We examine how firms can create word-of-mouth peer influence and social contagion by designing viral features into their products and marketing campaigns. Word-of-mouth (WOM) is generally considered to be more effective at promoting product contagion when it is personalized and active....

Product variety in many industries has increased steadily throughout this century. Component sharing-using the same version of a component across multiple products-is increasingly viewed by companies as a way to offer high variety in the marketplace while retaining low variety in their...

This paper studies an organizational architecture that I call information-age architecture. I define a measure of organizational IQ and test whether it is related to financial and market success using data from the fast-moving information technology industry. Higher organizational IQ is...

Organizations increasingly seek solutions to their open-ended design problems by employing a contest approach in which search over a solution space is delegated to outside agents. We study this new class of problems, which are costly to specify, pose credibility issues for the focal firm, and...

How can firms profitably give away free products? This paper provides a novel answer and articulates trade-offs in a space of information product design. We introduce a formal model of two-sided network externalities based in textbook economics---a mix of Katz and Shapiro network effects, price...

An important problem in the product design and development process is to use the part-worths preferences of potential customers to design a new product such that market share is maximized. The authors present a new optimization framework for this problem, the nested partitions (NP) method. This...

Green product development, which addresses environmental issues through product design and innovation as opposed to the traditional end-of-pipe-control approach, is receiving significant attention from customers, industries, and governments around the world. In this paper we develop a...

A callable product is a unit of capacity sold to self-selected low-fare customers who willingly grant the capacity provider the option to "call" the capacity at a prespecified recall price. We analyze callable products in a finite-capacity setting with two fare classes where low-fare customers...

We describe a model examining how a firm might choose the package size and price for a product that deteriorates over time. Our model considers four factors: (1) the usable life of the product, (2) the rates at which consumers use the product, (3) the relation between package size and the...