We study a duopoly model where consumers are heterogeneous with respect to their willingness to pay for two product characteristics and marginal costs are increasing with the quality level chosen on each attribute. We show that although firms seek to manage competition through product...

We model a duopoly in which ex ante identical firms must decide where to direct their innovation efforts. The firms face market uncertainty about consumers' preferences for innovation on two product attributes and technology uncertainty about the success of their research and development (R&D)...

The Internet has increased the flexibility of retailers, allowing them to operate an online arm in addition to their physical stores. The online channel offers potential benefits in selling to customer segments that value the convenience of online shopping, but it also raises new challenges....

This paper studies the competition between firms for influencers in a network. Firms spend effort to convince influencers to recommend their products. The analysis identifies the offensive and defensive roles of spending on influencers. The value of an influencer only depends on the in-degree...

Contextual advertising entails the display of relevant ads based on the content that consumers view, exploiting the potential that consumers' content preferences are indicative of their product preferences. This paper studies the strategic aspects of such advertising, considering an intermediary...

We develop a spreading activation model, which we call the category activation model, to predict where within a category structure consumers are likely to position a subcategory that they have created to accommodate a new hybrid product. Based on this model, we hypothesize that the probability...

Consider the following modification of the Barabási-Albert random graph. At every step a new vertex is added to the graph. It is connected to the old vertices randomly, with probabilities proportional to the degree of the other vertex, and independently of each other. We show that the...

Web sites invest significant resources in trying to influence their visibility in online search results. We study the economic incentives of Web sites to invest in this process known as search engine optimization. We focus on methods that improve sites' ranking among the search results without...

Paid placements on search engines reached sales of nearly $11 billion in the United States last year and represent the most rapidly growing form of online advertising today. In its classic form, a search engine sets up an auction for each search word in which competing websites bid for their...

We model the commercial World Wide Web as a directed graph that emerges as the equilibrium of a game in which utility maximizing websites purchase (advertising) in-links from each other while also setting the price of these links. In equilibrium, higher content sites tend to purchase more...