Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(906)
- Faculty Publications (122)
- February 2018
- Article
Auctions versus Posted Prices in Online Markets
By: Liran Einav, Chiara Farronato, Jonathan Levin and Neel Sundaresan
Auctions were very popular in the early days of internet commerce, but today online sellers mostly use posted prices. We model the choice between auctions and posted prices as a trade-off between competitive price discovery and convenience. Evidence from eBay fits the... View Details
- December 2017 (Revised March 2019)
- Case
Armarium: Luxury Fashion Brands for Rent
By: Jill Avery, David Fubini, Natasha Dossa and Devon Stewart
Armarium, a two-sided online platform that offered consumers the opportunity to rent the most coveted, current season high fashion clothing and accessories from the top global luxury brands, had emerged from its first sales season with two distinct customer segments:... View Details
Keywords: Brand Management; Retailing; Sharing Economy; Luxury Brand; Ecommerce; Startup; Fashion; Brand Positioning; Customer Acquisition; Internet Marketing; Marketing; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Business Startups; Luxury; Consumer Behavior; Growth and Development Strategy; Social Media; E-commerce; Fashion Industry; Retail Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; United States; North America
- November 2017 (Revised October 2018)
- Case
Brandless: Disrupting Consumer Packaged Goods
By: Jill Avery
Brandless, an online direct-to-consumer seller of upscale private-label consumer packaged goods, offered consumers a limited assortment of values-conscious products delivered directly to their homes with the simplicity of one fixed $3 price point that promised an... View Details
Keywords: Brand; Brand Management; Retailing; Retailing Industry; Private Label; Direct To Consumer Marketing; Ecommerce; Digital Marketing; Consumer Packaged Goods; Startup; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Disruption; Food; Product Marketing; Marketing Channels; Consumer Behavior; Brands and Branding; Venture Capital; E-commerce; Consumer Products Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Retail Industry; United States; North America
- November–December 2017
- Article
Match Your Own Price? Self-Matching as a Retailer's Multichannel Pricing Strategy
By: Pavel Kireyev, Vineet Kumar and Elie Ofek
Multichannel retailing has created several new strategic choices for retailers. With respect to pricing, an important decision is whether to offer a “self-matching policy,” which allows a multichannel retailer to offer the lowest of its online and store prices to... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Opportunistic Returns and Dynamic Pricing: Empirical Evidence from Online Retailing in Emerging Markets
By: Chaithanya Bandi, Antonio Moreno, Donald Ngwe and Zhiji Xu
We investigate how dynamic pricing can lead to higher operational costs through more product returns in the online retail industry. Dynamic pricing has been widely applied by many online retailers. Research has shown that, in response to dynamic pricing, some customers... View Details
- January 2017 (Revised August 2019)
- Case
X Fire Paintball & Airsoft: Is Amazon a Friend or Foe? (A)
By: Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella
Three years after launching his brick-and-mortar store, X Fire Paintball and Airsoft, Steve Herbert Sr. and his sons began selling products on Amazon.com’s third-party Marketplace, and online sales expanded rapidly. Over time, X Fire noticed that products of which it... View Details
- January 2017 (Revised August 2019)
- Supplement
X Fire Paintball & Airsoft: Is Amazon a Friend or Foe? (B)
By: Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella
Three years after launching his brick-and-mortar store, X Fire Paintball and Airsoft, Steve Herbert Sr. and his sons began selling products on Amazon.com’s third-party Marketplace and online sales expanded rapidly. Over time, X Fire noticed that products of which it... View Details
- Article
Are Online and Offline Prices Similar? Evidence from Large Multi-Channel Retailers
By: Alberto Cavallo
Online prices are increasingly used for measurement and research applications, yet little is known about their relation to prices in physical stores, where most retail transactions occur. I conduct the first large-scale comparison of prices simultaneously collected... View Details
- August 2016 (Revised August 2017)
- Case
AnswerDash (Abridged)
By: Elie Ofek and Jeffrey D. Shulman
It is 2014 and AnswerDash, a startup backed by venture capital, has not seen the widespread adoption of their online self-service customer support solution that they were expecting based on early success in helping clients save and generate substantial amounts of... View Details
Keywords: Pricing; Economic Value Estimation; Price Metrics; Organizational Selling; Innovation Adoption; Business To Business; Marketing; Customer Lifetime Value; Venture Capital; Customer Relationship Management; Price; Marketing Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Technology Adoption; Business Startups; Sales; Innovation and Invention; Product Marketing; Financial Services Industry
- Article
Distance and Political Boundaries: Estimating Border Effects under Inequality Constraints
By: Fernando Borraz, Alberto Cavallo, Roberto Rigobon and Leandro Zipitria
The border effects literature finds that political boundaries have a large impact on relative prices across locations. In this paper we show that the standard empirical specification suffers from selection bias, and propose a new methodology based on binned-quantile... View Details
- June 2016 (Revised August 2017)
- Case
AnswerDash
By: Elie Ofek and Jeffrey D. Shulman
It is 2014, and AnswerDash, a startup backed by venture capital, has not seen the widespread adoption of their online self-service customer support solution that they were expecting based on early success in helping clients save and generate substantial amounts of... View Details
Keywords: Pricing; Economic Value Estimation; Price Metrics; Organizational Selling; Innovation Adoption; Business To Business; Marketing; Customer Lifetime Value; Venture Capital; Customer Relationship Management; Price; Marketing Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Technology Adoption; Business Startups; Sales; Innovation and Invention; Product Marketing; Financial Services Industry
- Spring 2016
- Article
The Billion Prices Project: Using Online Prices for Inflation Measurement and Research
By: Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon
New data-gathering techniques, often referred to as “Big Data” have the potential to improve statistics and empirical research in economics. In this paper we describe our work with online data at the Billion Prices Project at MIT and discuss key lessons for both... View Details
- Other Article
Online Discounting: Who is Leading the Race to the Bottom?
By: Ayelet Israeli, Eric Anderson and Anne Coughlan
A short review of the finidings in: Israeli, Ayelet, Eric Anderson, and Anne Coughlan. "Minimum Advertised Pricing: Patterns of Violation in Competitive Retail Markets." Marketing Science 35, no. 4 (July–August 2016): 539–564. View Details
Keywords: Pricing; Price Policies; Pricing Policies; Discounting; Retailing; Retailing Industry; Minimum Advertised Price; Ecommerce; E-Commerce Strategy; Price; Distribution Channels; Distribution; Digital Marketing; E-commerce; Retail Industry; Technology Industry; Advertising Industry; United States
- March 2016
- Article
To Groupon or Not to Groupon: The Profitability of Deep Discounts
By: Benjamin Edelman, Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers
We examine the profitability and implications of online discount vouchers, a relatively new marketing tool that offers consumers large discounts when they prepay for participating firms' goods and services. Within a model of repeat experience good purchase, we examine... View Details
- Winter 2016
- Article
Analytics for an Online Retailer: Demand Forecasting and Price Optimization
By: Kris J. Ferreira, Bin Hong Alex Lee and David Simchi-Levi
We present our work with an online retailer, Rue La La, as an example of how a retailer can use its wealth of data to optimize pricing decisions on a daily basis. Rue La La is in the online fashion sample sales industry, where they offer extremely limited-time... View Details
- May 2015
- Case
Pricing in a Digital World (2015)
By: John Gourville
Dynamic pricing, especially as practiced by Uber and Lift, seems to be all the rage. In this case, we look at five interesting applications of dynamic price and price customization, each made possible by advances in digital technology. These range from the online... View Details
- April 2015 (Revised March 2017)
- Case
Instacart and the New Wave of Grocery Startups
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
Instacart is testing an Uber-style solution to the challenge of building a home-delivered grocery business. It is backed by $220 million of venture funding. Will this model succeed where businessses like Webvan failed? What are the questions that this exploratory... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Match Your Own Price? Self-Matching as a Retailer's Multichannel Pricing Strategy
By: Pavel Kireyev, Vineet Kumar and Elie Ofek
Multichannel retailing has created several new strategic choices for firms. With respect to pricing, an important decision is whether to offer a "self-matching policy." Self-matching allows a multichannel retailer to offer the lowest of its online and in-store prices... View Details
- January 2015
- Article
Competing with Privacy
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Andres Hervas-Drane
We analyze the implications of consumer privacy for competition in the marketplace. We consider a market where firms set prices and disclosure levels for consumer information, and consumers observe both before deciding which firm to patronize and how much information... View Details
- Article
Doing Business with Strangers: Reputation in Online Service Marketplaces
By: Antonio Moreno and Christian Terwiesch
Online service marketplaces allow service buyers to post their project requests and service providers to bid for them. To reduce the transactional risks, marketplaces typically track and publish previous seller performance. By analyzing a detailed transactional data... View Details