We designed an experiment that examines how knowledge about the price of a good, and the time at which the information is received, affects how the good is experienced. The good in question was wine, and the price was either high or low. Our results suggest that hosts offering wine to guests can...

The trademark doctrine of post-sale confusion is a creation of the lower federal courts that has never been accepted, or even considered, by the Supreme Court. This article argues that the doctrine should be discarded. Courts use the term “post-sale confusion” inconsistently to refer to...

This paper considers duopolistic firms targeting informative messages to consumers who share information locally with their neighbors in the network graph. A monopolist targets efficiently by sending messages to a parsimonious set of nodes that leave the whole population informed either directly...

This Article considers the spillover effects of trademarks - in particular, brand spillovers, which occur when consumer interest in a trademark increases the profits of third parties who do not own the trademark. Using techniques such as loss leaders and shelf space adjacency, retailers...

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?...

Traditional models of the economics of search suggest that as the material costs associated with searching for products and services are greatly reduced because of the Internet, consumers should search more extensively in online contexts. Recent empirical evidence strongly contradicts this...

A large body of chiefly laboratory research has attempted to demonstrate that people can exhibit choice-averse behavior from cognitive overload when faced with many options. However, meta-analyses of these studies, which are generally of one or two product lines, reveal conflicting results....

This paper is an empirical examination of observational learning. Using data from an online market for music, I find that observational learning benefits consumers, producers of high-quality music, and the online platform. I also study the role of pricing as a friction to the learning pro- cess...

I investigate the identification of social learning in online markets. In these markets, there is often a two-stage decision making process where a consumer first chooses whether or not to search a product and then chooses whether or not to buy it. Additionally, the social learning signals are...