How consumers use review content in their decision making has remained a black box due to the labor-intensive nature of extracting content from review text and the lack of data on review-reading behavior. In this study, we overcome this challenge by applying deep-learning- based natural language...

"Brushing"---online merchants placing fake orders of their own products---has been a growing phenomenon on major e-commerce platforms. On the one hand, brushing enables merchants to boost their rankings in search results, because products with higher sales volume are often ranked higher. On the...

We use variation in wind speeds at surfing locations in Switzerland as exogenous shifters of users' propensity to post content about their surfing activity onto an online social network. We exploit this variation to test whether users' online content generation activity has a causal effect on...

New empirical models of consumer demand that incorporate social preferences, observational learning, word-of-mouth or network effects have the feature that the adoption of others in the reference group - the “installed-base” - has a causal effect on current adoption behavior. Estimation of...