Managers are very interested in word of mouth communication because they believe that a product's success is related to the word of mouth that it generates. However, there are at least three significant challenges associated with measuring word of mouth. First, how does one even gather the data?...

We investigate the equilibrium relationship between product quality and word-of-mouth communication. Specifically, we ask whether firms should optimally produce "better" products when consumers are more likely to exchange information? The critical moderating factor in our model is the nature of...

In a range of studies across platforms, online ratings have been shown to be characterized by distributions with disproportionately-heavy tails. We focus on understanding the underlying process that yields such “j-shaped” or “extreme” distributions. We propose a novel theoretical...