Despite many success stories, B2B e-commerce penetration remains low. Many firms introduce electronic channels in addition to their traditional sales channels, but find that buyer usage of the e-channel over time does not keep up with initial expectations. Firms must understand the underlying factors that drive channel usage and how these factors change over time and across buyers. Using panel ...

Two current trends, information overload combined with increased control of marketers (e.g., on the Internet) over the manner in which their products are sold and presented to buyers, suggest that deciding what information to provide or not to provide can determine a product’s success in the marketplace. Although it has long been recognized that most purchase decisions are made with incomplete ...

Two current trends, information overload combined with increased control of marketers (e.g., on the Internet) over the manner in which their products are sold and presented to buyers, suggest that deciding what information to provide or not to provide can determine a product’s success in the marketplace. Although it has long been recognized that most purchase decisions are made with incomplete ...

In our model, two profit-maximizing sellers sell a homogeneous good to Bayesian, riskneutral buyers in an online comparison shopping service. Buyers use a reputation system to update their beliefs about sellers. Buyers purchase from the seller that maximizes the buyer’s expected utility from the purchase. We find that the seller’s profit depends on the distribution of buyer beliefs. A degenerat...

We consider a population of buyers who have unit demand for a homogeneous good, and only differ in terms of how soon they need to purchase it. These buyers have access to a stochastic stream of second-price auctions, as well as a retail outlet that can be used at any time. We characterize the equilibrium bidding dynamics, showing that bidders steadily raise their reservation price as they appro...

Internet-mediated dialogs between sellers and buyers have disadvantages relative to speaking with human purchase advisors or sales agents. Yet the Internet also offers the advantages of enormous knowledge resources, convenience, unbiased information, search agents, and currency. Principles for creating successful conversations with buyers are presented, and a purchase aiding system under develo...

This study validates a spreadsheet for conditional trend analysis (CTA). CTA was introduced by Goodhardt and Ehrenberg (1967) as an extension to the negative binomial distribution. It predicts the purchase rate of consumers in a subsequent period, based on their current period purchase class (zero buyers, bought once, twice and so forth). These predictions allow companies who use panel data to ...

This paper studies price dynamics in a setting in which a monopolist sells a new experience good over time to many buyers, and the seller can neither price discriminate among the buyers nor commit to a price rule. Buyers learn from their own experiences about the effectiveness of the product. Individual learning generates ex post heterogeneity, which affects the buyers’ purchasing decisions, th...