Publications

17 Dec 2014
Research & Ideas

How Our Brain Determines if the Product is Worth the Price

typing a dollar amount into an online form. Surprisingly, the average willingness-to-pay amount was slightly lower in cases where they had viewed the price first. This indicates that if retailers want to... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail

August 2002 (Revised August 2003)
Case

Electronic Arts Introduces The Sims Online

By: Youngme E. Moon

Electronic Arts (EA), the world's largest independent game publisher, is preparing to launch an online, subscription-based version of the most popular PC game in history: The Sims. The new game is called "The Sims Online" and it differs from the original game in two... View Details

Keywords: Fair Value Accounting; Decision Making; Price; Product Launch; Market Entry and Exit; Internet; Entertainment and Recreation Industry

Research Summary

Overview

By: Ayelet Israeli

Professor Israeli utilizes econometric methods and field experiments to study data driven decision making in marketing context. Her research focuses on data-driven marketing, with an emphasis on how businesses can leverage their own data, customer data, and market data... View Details

Keywords: Channel Management; Pricing; Pricing Policies; Online Marketing; E-commerce; Analytics; Econometrics; Field Experiments; Data Analytics; Artificial Intelligence; Value Of Data

05 Mar 2009
Working Paper Summaries

CPC/CPA Hybrid Bidding in a Second Price Auction

Keywords: by Benjamin Edelman & Hoan Soo Lee

August 2014
Case

Netflix in 2011

By: Willy Shih and Stephen Kaufman

Reed Hastings founded Netflix to provide a home movie service that would do a better job satisfying customers than the traditional retail rental model. But as it encountered challenges it underwent several major strategy shifts, ultimately developing a business model... View Details

Web

Corporate Training Programs | HBS Online

learning experience, resulting in an 85% completion rate across all courses. Impact 8 out of 10 participants surveyed say taking an HBS Online course impacted their professional lives for the better. Discounted View Details

Web

Business Fundamentals Course - CORe | HBS Online

effective pricing strategies Identify sources of competitive advantage through differentiation Evaluate the financial health of a business using financial statements Prepare and evaluate financial forecasts Who Will Benefit Professionals... View Details

2022
Working Paper

Algorithmic Assortment Curation: An Empirical Study of Buybox in Online Marketplaces

By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno

Most online sales worldwide take place in marketplaces that connect sellers and buyers. The presence of numerous third-party sellers leads to a proliferation of listings for each product, making it difficult for customers to choose between the available options. Online... View Details

Keywords: Algorithms; E-commerce; Sales; Digital Marketing; Internet and the Web; Customer Satisfaction

SSRN

November 23, 2022
Article

The Sinister Logic of Hidden Online Fees

By: Michael Luca

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; E-commerce; Price

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June 2002 (Revised September 2005)
Case

Online Music Distribution in a Post-Napster World

By: Youngme E. Moon

Provides a description of the rise and decline of Napster, the free Internet music-swapping service. Also describes second-generation peer-to-peer services (e.g., Gnutella) as well as paid subscription services (e.g., MusicNet, pressplay). View Details

Keywords: Distribution; Internet and the Web; Price; Marketing Channels; Service Operations; Music Industry

01 Dec 2015
News

Faculty Q&A: The Price Is Right

What intrigued you about the pay-what-you-want (PWYW) model? It’s very unusual for a firm or a seller to completely relinquish pricing power to their customers. Typically consumers encounter a price, and then they decide whether or not... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna

06 Mar 2019
News

Tesla’s Online Selling Is a Big Bet on Millennials

2024
Working Paper

Markups and Cost Pass-through Along the Supply Chain

By: Santiago E. Alvarez, Alberto Cavallo, Alexander MacKay and Paolo Mengano

We study markups and pricing strategies along the supply chain. Our unique dataset combines detailed price and cost information from a large global manufacturer with matched retail prices collected online for the period July 2018 through June 2023. We show that total... View Details

Keywords: Markups; Pricing; Price; Supply Chain; Inflation and Deflation; Cost

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09 Dec 2015
Research Event

When Hosts Attack: The Competitive Threat of Online Platforms

In the online marketplace, oodles of retailers and developers rely on “platforms” such as Amazon.com, the Apple App Store, Facebook, and Twitter to get their products and services into the hands of users. Retailers, for example, sell... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail; Technology; Web Services

Article

Currency Unions, Product Introductions, and the Real Exchange Rate

By: Alberto Cavallo, Brent Neiman and Roberto Rigobon

We use a novel dataset of online prices of identical goods sold by four large global retailers in dozens of countries to study good-level real exchange rates and their aggregated behavior. First, in contrast to the prior literature, we demonstrate that the law of one... View Details

Keywords: Currency Union; Law Of One Price; International Prices; Global Firm; Currency Exchange Rate; Price; International Finance

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05 Mar 2019
Working Paper Summaries

The Impacts of Increasing Search Frictions on Online Shopping Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Keywords: by Donald Ngwe, Kris J. Ferreira, and Thales Teixeira; Retail; Apparel & Accessories; Consumer Products

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

Keywords: Border Effects; Prices