Marketing Science

This paper builds a game theory model of influencer endorsements and product comments by their followers.

Many customers choose products based on information from social media influencers. Companies can pay these influencers to promote their products. We develop a model in which customers read an influencer’s sponsored post for a mix of entertainment and ...

This paper examines the ramification of the platform’s dual role on its featuring strategy, sellers’ pricing strategies, and consumer welfare.

A digital platform operates the marketplace that connects third-party merchants to consumers and simultaneously participates in its marketplace by selling its own product directly to consumers. This dual role raises the concern that the platform may be ...

When a firm releases its product later than its competitor, the firm loses sales because many consumers prefer to buy the competitor’s product rather than wait for the firm’s product release. Therefore, in the absence of any late-mover advantages, ...

This paper provides evidence that consumers who disagree with a soda tax decrease their consumption more strongly to avoid the tax burden.

Public policies that restrict or intervene in consumer choices are often controversial. We investigate whether consumers’ disagreement with a policy affects how they respond to that policy using a natural experiment in Washington state, where a ...

We study how market competition influences the algorithmic design choices of firms in the context of targeting. Firms face a general bias-variance trade-off when choosing the design of a supervised learning algorithm in terms of model complexity or the ...

We study the optimal prices and allocation probabilities for loot boxes and their implications for profits and social welfare.

A loot box is a probabilistic allocation of virtual products, the exact outcome of which is known to consumers only after purchase. Consumers sometimes purchase these goods multiple times until their preferred products are obtained. As loot boxes have ...

This paper studies the impact of nonstrategic seller-induced delays on the buyer’s willingness to pay in price negotiations.

Price negotiations are often characterized by either the buyer or the seller introducing delays and interruptions. In the bargaining literature, time delays are considered costly and could lower the consumer’s incentives to engage in bargaining and also ...

This paper studies publishers’ tradeoffs in disclosing information to advertisers in the presence of agencies, through which advertisers may coordinate bids.

Studies have shown that agencies in online advertising can exercise their market power over publishers to extract surplus. This may happen in the form of bid coordination where the agencies hold out some ad candidates from publishers’ auctions to soften ...

Inequality may be a unique outcome in symmetric markets with two-sided search.

This paper examines whether and under what conditions one should expect equilibrium inequality in markets where agents in each of two populations look for an optimal alternative from the other population through a costly sequential search. It shows that a ...