Conventional wisdom suggests that one of the goals of manufacturer advertising is to reduce the cross-price elasticity between products (make one's own and rivals' products appear to be substitutable in the eyes of consumers). Conventional wisdom also suggests that, all else being equal,...

Click fraud is the practice of deceptively clicking on search ads with the intention of either increasing third-party website revenues or exhausting an advertiser's budget. Search advertisers are forced to trust that search engines detect and prevent click fraud even though the engines get paid...

Media firms compete in two connected markets. They face rivalry for the sale of content to consumers, and at the same time, they compete for advertisers seeking access to the attention of these consumers. We explore the implications of such two-sided competition on the actions and source of...

In this paper we analyze the joint implications of two effects: (a) inserting independent profit-maximizing retailers into the channel system provides “buffering” to the manufacturers from price competition when their products are highly substitutable and intrachannel contracts are...

In a competitive marketplace, the effectiveness of any element of the marketing mix is determined not only by its absolute value, but also by its relative value with respect to the competition. For example, the effectiveness of a price cut in increasing demand is critically related to...

This paper develops a model to address an important problem facing a manufacturer of a durable product. That is, how can it plan its new product introductions to minimize the obsolescence of the old product, preserve its market for the new product, and keep copycat products at bay? We analyze...

Manufacturers often have a choice of whether to advertise something positive about their own products without mentioning their rivals' products (a noncomparative ad) or whether to portray their rivals negatively in addition to promoting their own products (a comparative ad). In this paper we...

The e-marketplace has emerged as an important electronic shopping environment that, according to a recent report, may evolve into a dominant force in Internet marketing. We investigate an e-marketplace with online stores offering competing products. We find that featuring is associated with a...

While retailers have sales data to forecast demand, manufacturers have a broad understanding of the market and the coming trends. It is well known that pooling such demand information within a distribution channel improves supply chain logistics. However, little is known about how...

We model the commercial World Wide Web as a directed graph that emerges as the equilibrium of a game in which utility maximizing websites purchase (advertising) in-links from each other while also setting the price of these links. In equilibrium, higher content sites tend to purchase more...