Prompted by a real-life observation in the UK retail market, a two-player Prisoners' Dilemma model of an alliance between two firms is adapted to include the response of a rival firm, resulting in a version of a three-player Prisoners' Dilemma. We use this to analyse the impact on the stability...

Sponsored search advertising has grown rapidly since the last decade and is now a significant revenue source for search engines. To ameliorate revenues, search engines often set fixed or variable reserve price to in influence advertisers' bidding. This paper studies and compares two pricing...

It is widely accepted in word-of-mouth (WOM) research that weak ties have a greater macro-level impact than strong ties on the spread of WOM and that marketers should thus intentionally stimulate WOM between weak ties to optimize a given WOM campaign. Here, we challenge this idea based on the...

The development of network technology has prompted the gradual rise of lending platforms, which not only meet the borrowing needs of the long-tail population, but also provide new investment methods for investors with idle funds. However, behind the rapid development of P2P online lending is...