A consumer contest is a sales promotion technique that requires participants to apply certain skills as they compete for prizes or awards. This article is the first to employ a game-theoretical approach to investigate consumer contest design issues, including prize structure, segmentation, and...

Social media platforms such as Facebook show ads with popularity or general endorsement signals such as “likes”. Additionally, these ads can display social endorsement from friends (i.e., friends’ “likes”). This paper examines the effectiveness of displaying these different signals on...

The capabilities of network technologies have facilitated the growth of electronic commerce. Major issues — notably, security and product quality uncertainty — still pose serious challenges to the further adoption of electronic commerce. Traditional market transactions have a long history...

Organizations face a competitive certification market for their statements, the statements do not convince third parties unless certified, the organizations are sometimes better served by a lie, and honest mistakes are possible. In our model of such a market: if certifiers are liable for...

We set up a game-theoretic model to examine the oligopolistic price competition, considering two features of online search: the existence of a common search ordering and shoppers who have non-positive search cost. We find that in equilibrium firms set their prices probabilistically rather than...

This paper studies how to endogenously assess the value of a ldquo;superiorrdquo; advertising position within the price competition and examines the resulting location competition outcomes and price dispersion patterns. We consider a game-theoretic model in which firms compete for advertising...