A prime function of many major World Wide Web applications is Online Service Allocation (OSA), the function of matching individual consumers with particular services/goods (which may include loans or jobs as well as products) each with its own producer. In the applications of interest, consumers...

Few studies have successfully examined the empirical impact of limited information processing on real economic variables. The challenge relies, of course, on the difficulty of measuring an economic agent's degree of attention/inattention paid to different types of information. This paper...

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...

Using a panel data of more than 250 users for over a year, we examine the relation between user visits to content infringing sites and the number of malware found on their machines. A key aspect of our data is that the users are observed in the real world, at their homes, and the data is...