Search

The Internet enables businesses to acquire a great deal of information, including prices in the open markets. In this study, we investigate what the value of reference price information is to a company in the market and how the company can make use of such information. Using business analytics, we were able to estimate prices of used cars for a rent-a-car company. The results show that a smart pricing information system is useful for collecting online reference price information and for estimating future prices of used cars and rental prices.

Subscription business model is common in many online services. It is crucial to service providers to acquire and retain more customers. Because customers can switch one service to another easily, price promotion may cause economic loss of the providers. The aim of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of cherry pickers in subscription-based online services. We find that cherry pickers use online music streaming services more actively and apply their investment to the service more readily than non-cherry pickers.

Online communities have experienced burgeoning popularity over the last decade and have become a key platform for users to share information and interests, and to engage in social interactions. Drawing on the social contagion literature, the authors examine the effect of online social connections on users’ product purchases in an online community. They assess how product, user, and network characteristics influence the social contagion effect in users’ spending behavior. The authors use a unique large-scale data set from a popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game community—consisting of users’ detailed gaming activities, their social connections, and their in-game purchases of functional and hedonic products—to examine the impact of gamers’ social networks on their purchase behavior. The analysis, based on a double-hurdle model that captures gamers’ decisions of playing and spending levels, reveals evidence of “social dollars,” whereby social interaction between gamers in the community increases their in-game product purchases. Interestingly, the results indicate that social influence varies across different types of products. Specifically, the effect of a focal user's network ties on his or her spending on hedonic products is greater than the effect of network ties on the focal user's spending on functional products. Furthermore, the authors find that user experience negatively moderates social contagion for functional products, whereas it positively moderates contagion for hedonic products. In addition, dense networks enhance contagion over functional product purchases, whereas they mitigate the social influence effect over hedonic product purchases. The authors perform a series of tests and robustness checks to rule out the effect of confounding factors. They supplement their econometric analyses with dynamic matching techniques and estimate average treatment effects. The results of the study have implications for both theory and practice and help provide insights on how managers can monetize social networks and use social information to increase user engagement in online communities.