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...

Using data from Taiwan's Yahoo! auctions of Nikon cameras, this paper investigates whether there exists any difference in transaction results between commodities which are sold by authorized sellers and those which are parallel imports. We find that the parallel imports and the authorized...

E-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Alibaba and Flipkart, that match sellers and consumers at an unprecedented scale, operate their internal search engines to help buyers find relevant products from a large number of sellers, and also allow sellers to advertise to consumers for positions in...

We measure the effectiveness of competitive advertising on brand search using alarge-scale, quasi-experimental ad allocation on Bing. Competitors are able to stealtraffic from the focal brand, and they steal an order of magnitude more clicks if the focalbrand's link is exogenously removed from...

Online advertisers often utilize multiple publishers to deliver ads to multi-homing consumers. These ads often generate externalities and their exposure is uncertain, which impacts advertising effectiveness across publishers. We analytically analyze the inefficiencies created by externalities...

Online freelance marketplaces are websites that match buyers of electronically deliverable services with freelancers. While freelancing has grown in recent years, it faces the classic ‘information asymmetry’ problem – buyers face uncertainty over seller quality. Typically, these markets...

Retailers selling items through Internet auctions frequently use buy-now prices (BNPs), which allow the immediate selling of an item to consumers at a fixed price. Previous research has proposed several theories of the usage of BNPs by bidders. We study the usage of BNPs from a seller's point of...

Retailers often conduct non-overlapping sequential online auctions as a revenue generation and inventory clearing tool. We build a stochastic dynamic programming model for the seller’s lot-size decision problem in these auctions. The model incorporates a random number of participating bidders...

The radio spectrum that governments license to mobile operators is central to the quality and affordability of mobile broadband services. However, some government policies – inadvertently or not – result in high prices being paid to access spectrum. This empirical study assesses whether high...

The $4.7 billion acquisition of Smithfield Foods, Inc. by China's Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd. (now WH Group Ltd.) marks the largest Chinese takeover of a U.S. company in history. In this study, we explored how this acquisition affected consumers' willingness-to-pay for meat products in...