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...

We consider an online market where consumers may obtain digital goods from two mutually exclusive channels: a legitimate channel consisting of many law-abiding retailers, or a piracy channel consisting of many piracy services. We analyze consumer choice, retailer strategy and piracy control...

Third-party sellers in online marketplaces provide wide product/service variety and are highly heterogeneous in the capability of delivering value to buyers. Seller variety and value heterogeneity shape seller competition, which then affects the marketplace owner’s profit. This paper presents...

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...