This paper studies the effect of sales tax changes on internet and catalog sales. We collect sales data from a retailer that sells its products through its internet and catalog channels. We analyze the retailer's sales before and after a major tax cut in one of the largest metropolitan areas in...

The multibillion-dollar online advertising industry continues to debate whether to use the CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per action) pricing model as an industry standard. This article applies the economic framework of incentive contracts to study how these pricing models can lead to risk...

Trust is particularly important in online markets to facilitate the transfer of sensitive consumer information to online retailers. In electronic markets, various proposals have been made to facilitate these information transfers. We develop analytic models of hidden information to analyze the...

The impact of multi-channel technology-enabled digital goods on the sales of the physical counterpart faces uncertainty in the electronic commerce domain. We address the issue empirically by identifying the effect of the availability of digitally-delivered movies on physical DVD movie sales....

Peer-to-peer (P2P) services allow users to share networked resources, notably bandwidth and content, from the edges of the network. These services have been popularized because of file sharing - particularly the sharing of unlicensed copyrighted files. Concerns about such P2P file sharing were...

Internet consumers derive significant surplus from increased product variety, and in particular, the “Long Tail” of niche products that can be found on the Internet at retailers like Amazon.com. In this paper we analyze how the shape of Amazon’s sales distribution curve has changed from...

The Internet and related information technologies are transforming the distribution of product sales across products, and the effects are likely to grow in coming years. Both the Long Tail and the Superstar effect are manifestations of these changes, yet researchers lack consistent metrics or...

The emergence of the maker movement has democratized the production of goods and increased consumer demand for designer goods, leading to the founding of e-commerce platforms such as Etsy, Fab, and Gilt. Designers with little brand recognition have to overcome high buyer search costs in order to...