A major challenge in many word-of-mouth marketing campaigns is the cost-effective identification of opinion leaders, consumers who exert disproportionate influence on the purchase decisions of other consumers. However, empirical studies agree on few consumer characteristics that are strong...

Legal scholars and academic commentators have long written about the ways in which close-knit communities of people employ extra-legal or non-legal methods to structure conflict, resolve disputes, and advocate for their rights and interests. From cattle ranchers to diamond merchants to...

The Internet has enabled the era of user-generated content, threatening the hegemony of traditional content generators as the primary sources of "legitimate" information. In this study, we examine the usefulness of such content, consisting of data from blogs and social networking sites, in...

Second life (henceforward, SL) has captured the interest of many scholars and practitioners. Indeed, the entrance of many real world companies, attracted by the potentialities of Virtual Worlds (henceforward, VWs), has been interpreted as the signal for the discovery of new web-based business...

We examine how word-of-mouth learning may lead to uniform and possibly inefficient actions in finite time among a network of agents. In our model, agents are identically informed a priori and observe network neighbors’ actions as well as the payoffs of some or all of those actions (a...

Suppose that a firm in charge of a business ecosystem is a firm in charge of a microeconomy. To achieve the highest growth rate, how open should that economy be? To encourage third-party developers, how long should their intellectual property interests last? We develop a sequential innovation...

Applying economic analysis, we explore the potential benefits and risks associated with firm-based and social production models and derive conditions that determine when open or closed innovation models are more appropriate. We contrast the newly emerging "user-generated approach" to innovation...

Members of online communities access consumption related information posted by several other members. Over time, members are influenced by some members of the community, and develop informal relationships with them. We propose a model for the timing of the establishment of relationships between...

Recently, Nature published an article comparing the quality of Wikipedia articles to those of Encyclopedia Britannica (Giles 2005). The article, which gained much public attention, provides evidence for Wikipedia quality, but does not provide an explanation of the underlying source of that...

Privacy laws based on fair information practices have been ineffective in protecting children's online privacy because they are based on a narrow interpretation of Alan Westin's definition of privacy as informational control. Although Westin's original definition started with informational...