"This paper considers the possibility that a firm can invest not only in the true product quality, but also in activities such as merchandizing and store atmospherics that influence consumer perception of the product quality. Consumers make their purchase decisions based on the signal...

An important phenomenon on the Internet has been the emergence of "infomediaries" or Internet referral services such as Autobytel.com and Carpoint.com in the automobile industry, Avviva.com in real estate and Healthcareadvocates.com in medicine. These services offer consumers the opportunity to...

We analyze multi-market interactions between firms which must invest limited budgets in value (surplus) creation as well as in competitive rent-seeking activities. Firms are horizontally differentiated on a line segment and compete for multiple markets/prizes which differ in the relative...

Emerging markets are fast growing developing countries that are creating not only a rapidly expanding segment of middle class and rich consumers but also have a sizable segment of poor consumers. This paper presents an interdisciplinary perspective integrating insights from quantitative and...

This paper describes the incentives for firms to seek voluntary product safety certifications. We consider a firm which makes the decision of whether or not to seek certification prior to selling the product. We show that, even when the firm and the consumers have same beliefs about the product...

We investigate the strategic role of a recommender who cares about accuracy and whose recommendations influence product quality. In the presence of such feedback effects, recommendations have a self-fulling property: the recommendation agent can select any firm which will end up being the firm...

We investigate the incentives for social communication in the new social media technologies. Three features of online social communication are represented in the model. First, new social media platforms allow for increased connectivity: i.e., they enable sending messages to many more receivers,...