This dissertation examines the relationship among Information Technology (IT), product variety (PV), and firm performance. A salient trend in manufacturing in the past 20-30 years is a sharp shift from mass production to product variety proliferation. This coincides with the IT revolution, when...

Electronic commerce has enabled the use of intelligent agenttechnologies that can evaluate buyers, customize products, and price inreal-time. Our model of an electronic market with customizable productsanalyzes the pricing, profitability and welfare implications ofagent-based technologies that...

Sponsored search mechanisms, where advertisers bid for placement to beas close to the top in the listing of search results, are the fastestgrowing among online search models. Sponsored search in popular searchservices such as Google and Yahoo! employ an auction mechanism whereinfirms can bid,...

Secondary markets have adopted a number of quality signaling mechanismssuch as certification to reduce information asymmetries between buyersand sellers in these markets. However the importance and value of thesesignals depends on the nature and extent of information asymmetries.With the growth...

We study whether and how contractual arrangements (fixed price vs.time-and-materials contracts) change the effect of reputation,certification, and language characteristics on the chances of winningoutsourcing contracts. Using a comprehensive dataset from an onlineoutsourcing marketplace, we...

Recent developments in information technologies, especially Web 2.0 technologies, have radically transformed many markets through disintermediation and decentralization. Lower barriers of entry in these markets enable small firms and individuals to engage in transactions that were otherwise...

Sponsored search advertising has emerged as an important and significant forum for advertisers, accounting for 40% of all advertising spending online. The unique features of sponsored search advertising - the nature of consumer search as well as the pricing mechanisms employed - differentiate it...

The growth of the Internet and other digitization technologies has enabled the unbundling of the physical and information components of the value chain and has led to an explosion of information made available to consumers. Understanding the implications of this new informational landscape for...

The wide and growing popularity of online auctions creates enormous amounts of publicly available bid data providing an important topic for research. These data pose unique statistical challenges because of their special structures. This research focuses on methods for representing, visualizing,...

In recent years, the increasing popularity of eCommerce, and particularly online auctions has stirred a great amount of scholarly research, especially in information systems, economics,and marketing, but little or no attention has been received from statistics. ECommerce arrives with enormous...