Mediated superheroes have grown up, no longer relegated to serving as adolescent power fantasies or mindless diversions. Superheroes in comics and other forms of media carry with them rhetorical power and significance that deserve exploration. The purpose of this paper is to examine new and...

By studying the change in employees’ network positions before and after the introduction of a social networking tool, I find that information-rich networks (low in cohesion and rich in structural holes), enabled by social media, have a positive effect on various work outcomes. Contrary to the...

User-generated content is increasingly created through the collaborative efforts of multiple individuals. In this paper, we argue that the value of collaborative user-generated content is a function both of the direct efforts of its contributors and of its embeddedness in the...

Social networks are among the most dynamic forces on the Internet, increasingly displacing search engines as the primary way that end users find content and garnering headlines for their controversial stock offerings. In what may be considered a high-technology rite of passage, social networking...

Increase in the popularity of social networking and blogging sites has attracted the interest of the marketers and communication strategists, who forever are searching for new means of advertising. Advertising on these sites in the developed economies has been very successful and has led to...

Despite our understanding that social media and online healthcare communities can help to eliminate health information asymmetry and improve patients’ self-care engagement, we have yet to understand what happens when patients have access to others’ health data and how patients’ access to...

The paper aims to outline the managerial challenges faced by the companies interested in leveraging knowledge and creative talent embedded in online customers’ communities to sustain innovation in b-2-c industries. Through a detailed case-study analysis of a leading food producer (Barilla...

The system for the design, production, and dissemination of marketing scholarship aimed at contributing to marketing practice is under increasing strain due to pressures exerted by globalization, digitization, and environmentalism. Scholarly research in marketing adheres largely to a...

Online social networks are used by hundreds of millions of people every day, but little is known about their effect on behavior. In five experiments, we demonstrate that social network use enhances self-esteem in users who are focused on close friends (i.e., strong ties) while browsing their...

Do new media promote accountability in non-democratic countries, where offline media are often suppressed? We show that blog posts, which exposed corruption in Russian state-controlled companies, had a negative causal impact on their market returns. For identification, we exploit the precise...