The Internet has dramatically reduced search costs for customers through tools such as shopbots. The conventional wisdom is that this reduction in search costs will increase price competition leading to a decline in prices and profits for online firms. In this paper, we provide an argument for...

Previous research has suggested that households and individuals may possess multiple preferences for a given product category. These multiple preferences may be the result of multiple individuals, different uses and usage occasions, and/or variety seeking. As such, single ideal point models that...

Consumer goods manufacturers usually sell their brands to consumers through common independent retailers. Theoretical research on such channel structures has analyzed the optimal behavior of channel members under alternative assumptions of manufacturer-retailer interaction (Vertical Strategic...

As firms jockey to position themselves in emerging markets, firms need to evaluate the relative attractiveness of market expansion in different countries. Since the attractiveness of a market is a function of the eventual market potential and the speed at which the product diffuses through the...

The impact of a firm's strategic marketing mix choices on profitability can be evaluated by understanding the impact of those choices on consumer demand for the firm's products and on the firm's costs. Additionally, a firm's strategic marketing mix choices, and its demand and costs can be...

This paper examines the information embedded in both the stock and option markets prior to takeover announcements. During normal periods, buyer-seller initiated stock volume imbalances are significant predictors of next-day stock returns and option volume imbalances are uninformative. However,...

This paper parsimoniously characterizes how past returns affect the cross-section of expected returns. Using Fama-MacBeth regressions, it shows that the momentum and reversals associated with past returns over va

Despite the interest in measuring price sensitivity of online consumers, most academic work on Internet commerce is hindered by a lack of data on quality. In this paper we use publicly available data on the sales ranks of about 20,000 books to derive quantity proxies at the two leading online...

This paper proposes a new approach of valuing portfolios that contain illiquid assets. The approach has three major advantages. First, the estimators are arithmetic averages of individual asset returns or their proxies, so they strictly correspond to actual portfolio returns. Second, the...

Our model assumes that creditors need to expend resources to collect on claims. Consequently, because diffuse creditors suffer from mutual free-riding (Holmstrom (1982)), they fare worse than concentrated creditors (e.g. a house bank). The model predicts that measures of debt concentration...