This research reviews the current state of affairs in the fast-growing area of direct-to-consumer marketing of genetic tests. The authors identify the unique nature of genetic tests and the ensuing consumer vulnerability. They also present a comprehensive examination of the current legal environment and an empirical analysis of genetic testing companies’ online marketing practices. On the basis...

We develop a modeling approach to explain demand variation for an online platform of usergenerated content, and use it to measure the impact of marketing activities on decisions to visit the platform, and on decisions to create and buy content. The model explains individual-level decisions as a function of consumer characteristics, marketing activities, and behavior of other online users, allow...

BACKGROUND Illicit or rogue Internet pharmacies are a recognized global public health threat that have been identified as utilizing various forms of online marketing and promotion, including social media. OBJECTIVE To assess the accessibility of creating illicit no prescription direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) online pharmacy social media marketing (eDTCA2.0) and evaluate its potential g...

Sponsored search is an indispensable business model and a major revenue contributor of almost all the search engines. From the advertisers’ side, participating in ranking the search results by paying for the sponsored search advertisement to aŠract more awareness and purchase facilitates their commercial goal. From the users’ side, presenting personalized advertisement reƒecting their propensit...

Marketing and advertising support the U.S. economy by promoting the sale of goods and services to consumers, both adults and children. Sandra Calvert addresses product marketing to children and shows that although marketers have targeted children for decades, two recent trends have increased their interest in child consumers. First, both the discretionary income of children and their power to i...

Consumer online shopping behaviors are well attended in the IS and marketing literature. Yet, there is another group of individuals who spend a lot of time online but do not purchase anything. This online window shopping phenomenon is intriguing to both scholars and marketers yet it is less studied and little understood. Questions such as what the online window shopping consumers do during thei...

In this paper, we built an agent-based model to integrate and synthesize social science theories to inform online community design. As an example, we use the model to examine how various styles of moderating online conversations affect community performance. We compared three styles of moderation – no moderation, in which all members are exposed to all messages; community-level moderation, in w...

The ease of customer search and therefore comparison shopping online has received a lot of attention. While there is sufficient empirical evidence that the expected result of bertrand price competition does not necessarily occur, firms have still attempted to minimize search across other sites. For example, firms have tried to prohibit information gathering “spiders” from scanning their web pag...

Online service providers generate much of their revenue by monetizing user attention through online advertising. In this paper, we investigate revenue sharing, where the user is rewarded with a portion of the surplus generated from the advertising transaction, in a cost-perconversion advertising system. While revenue sharing can potentially lead to an increased user base, and correspondingly la...