When product quality is unknown, a natural supposition is that having more consumers informed will increase consumer surplus and welfare. However, when a monopolist is selling a product of unknown quality, welfare can decrease in the fraction of informed consumers

In many industries, firms reward their customers for making referrals. We analyze the optimal policy mix of price, advertising intensity, and referral fee for a monopoly when buyers choose to what extent to refer other consumers to the firm. We find that the firm uses its referral fee, but not...

Jun and Kim (2008) consider the optimal pricing and referral strategy of a monopoly that uses a consumer communication network to spread product information. They show that for any finite referral chain, the optimal policy involves a referral fee that provides strictly positive referral...