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As customers increasingly rely on online reviews for making consumption decisions, the dangers arising from misinformation and fakery have become an acute source of concern for consumers, firms, and society at large. Many online review platforms claim a role as guardians of trust in the information exchange process. Yet, little is known about the practices firms can utilize to design platforms that build and safeguard consumer trust. The authors draw on governance and identity disclosure literature streams to propose five practices that mitigate fakery and build trust in the platform: monitoring, exposure, community building, status endowment, and identity disclosure. Five studies (1) establish the individual and joint effects these practices have on platform trust, (2) identify the mediating processes by which the practices build trust, (3) verify the ecological value of the conceptual framework, (4) provide support of the salience of the practices, and (5) show how the practices build trust above and beyond review content–level characteristics. Interaction effects suggest that exposure, community building, and status endowment obviate the need for identity disclosure in building platform trust, a finding that mitigates related privacy concerns. Collectively, the findings can improve platform design, enabling review platforms to fulfill their promise of mitigating fakery and increasing trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We identify three key priorities for needed work on sales negotiations, based on current marketplace conditions and gaps in the literature. We call these priorities 'big spaces': blank or unoccupied portions or areas. Big space #1 considers who the negotiators might be, whether they are consumers or firms. While much research has considered the characteristics and motivation of individual negotiators, much less investigates the negotiating dyad as a mix of firms and individuals, or between two individuals. Big space #2 recognizes the need for more understanding of negotiations that occur in digital contexts. The pandemic has clearly accelerated movement to these spaces and illuminated many intriguing opportunities. Finally, Big space #3 considers relational phenomena that can arise between negotiators, even in brief, one-time encounters. We also suggest novel directions for negotiations that occur over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Franchise encroachment, or the addition of an outlet in the vicinity of existing franchisees, is largely viewed as resulting in revenue cannibalization of incumbent locations. Against this backdrop, the authors consider the possibility that the addition of same brand outlets can, in fact, also create positive effects via customer utility and ultimately benefit franchisees, due to a range of mechanisms such as quality signaling, learning, or brand awareness, resulting in a positive pathway on franchisee performance. The authors unpack this possibility using an experiment and detailed proprietary and publicly available data sets from the hotel industry over a five-year period. Their results show evidence of positive effects on customer utility for same-brand outlets and stronger effects for newer brands, cross brands, and online travel agency channel bookings. Counterfactual simulations indicate that although encroachment hurts franchisees on average, it can modestly benefit same-brand franchisees in low-brand-density markets. Together, the findings illustrate the potential "sunny side" of encroachment, underscoring the need to update our view of encroachment as context-dependent. The novel emphasis on customers versus the dominant firm view suggests customer and incumbent responses to encroachment should be accounted for in the development of franchise strategy and public policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, close relationships between firms and their suppliers and customers have been highly touted as a business strategy that can expand the pie of benefits for the parties involved. [...]