Mediating transactions through the Internet removes important cues that salespeople can use to assess a consumer's willingness to pay. We analyze whether dealers' difficulty in identifying consumer characteristics on the Internet and consumers' ease in finding information affect race and gender...

This paper discusses marketing strategies for a manufacturer of a composite product (i.e., a product sold in two parts to two separate types of consumers, which has greater value when used jointly by both consumers). It is assumed that expected sales of one product increase a different type of...

This paper addresses the question of how much the Internet lowers prices for new cars and why. Using a large dataset of transaction prices for new automobiles and referral data from Autobytel.com, we find that online consumers pay on average 1.2% less than do offline consumers. After controlling...

An extensive literature has focused on price competition and the Internet; however, little attention has been given to the Internet's impact on service competition. Services include activities such as the provision of product information, repairs, faster checkout, after-sales advice/information,...

The availability of digital channels for media distribution has raised many important questions for marketers, notably, whether digital distribution channels will cannibalize physical sales and whether legitimate digital distribution channels will dissuade consumers from using (illegitimate)...

In spite of industry concerns, prior work has shown that Internet used book markets do not significantly cannibalize new book sales. In this research note we analyze similar data from markets for CDs and DVDs, goods that because of their digital characteristics may be more susceptible to...

Much debate exists around the impact that illegal file sharing may have on the creative industries. Similarly, opinions differ regarding whether the producers of artistic works should be forced to accept any weakening of intellectual property rights resulting from illegal file sharing, or if...

We investigate consumers' choice behavior for Internet search engines. Within this broad agenda, we focus on two interrelated issues. First, we will document whether consumers develop loyalty to a particular search engine. If loyalty does indeed develop, we seek to understand what is the...

The Internet search engine market has seen a proliferation of entrants over the last few years. While Yahoo! was the early market leader, there has been entry by both lower quality engines and higher quality ones (such as Google). Prior work on quality differentiation requires that low quality...

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have emerged as a significant social phenomenon for the distribution of information goods and may become an important alternative to traditional client-server network architectures for knowledge sharing within enterprises. This paper reviews and synthesizes the...