Consumer Preferences and Firm Technology Choice

Published Research

Advances in technology change the way consumers search and shop for products. Emerging is the trend of home-shopping devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, which allow consumers to search or order products. We investigate how consumer brand and technology preferences may interact with the functionalities of technology-enabled shopping (TES) devices to determine the channel structure and market competition.Read More

To Diversify or Not? Multi-Platform Social Media Strategy and E-Commerce Performance

Funded Research Proposal

Xiaoning (Gavin) Wang, PhD Candidate, Lynn Wu, Operations, Information and Decisions, and Serguei Netessine, Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School Abstract: As the number of social platforms has grown dramatically in the past two decades, companies face an increasing number of options to choose among for their social media resourceRead More

Implications of Revenue Models and Technology for Content Moderation Strategies

Working Papers

This paper develops a theoretical model to study the economic incentives for a social media platform to moderate user-generated content. We show that a self-interested platform can use content moderation as an effective marketing tool to expand its installed user base, to increase the utility of its users, and to achieve its positioning as a moderate or extreme content platform.Read More

Designing Customer-Centric Organization Structures: Toward the Fluid Marketing Organization

Published Research

Today’s marketing organizations face unprecedented turbulence and complexity. To anticipate and adapt to fast changing customer preferences and environments, executives seek to make their internal organizations nimble and agile by constantly developing, integrating, and reconfiguring new capabilities. Read More

Network Overlap and Content Sharing on Social Media Platforms

Published Research

We study the impact of network overlap — the overlap in network connections between two users — on content sharing in directed social media platforms. We propose a hazards model that flexibly captures the impact of three different measures of network overlap (i.e., common followees, common followers and common mutual followers) on content sharing.Read More

Advertising Content and Consumer Engagement on Social Media: Evidence from Facebook

Published Research

We describe the effect of social media advertising content on customer engagement using data from Facebook. We content-code 106,316 Facebook messages across 782 companies, using a combination of Amazon Mechanical Turk and Natural Language Processing algorithms.Read More

To Boost Online Sales, Focus on Close-Knit Communities

David Bell

Word-of-mouth testimonials from consumers are effective in driving online sales. But these signals are even more powerful in communities where people have closer ties and trust each other, according to new research by Wharton marketing professor David Bell and Jae Lee. Read More

Do Organic Results Help or Hurt Sponsored Search Performance?

Published Research

We study the impact of changes in the position of competing listings in organic search results on the performance of sponsored search advertisements. Using data for several keywords from an online retailer’s ad campaign, we measure the impact of organic competition on both click-through rate and conversion rate of sponsored search ads for these keywords.Read More

Media Multiplexing Behavior: Implications for Targeting and Media Planning

Published Research

There is a growing trend among consumers to serially consume small, incomplete “chunks” of multiple media types—television, radio, Internet, and print—within a short time period. We refer to this behavior as media multiplexing and note the key challenges for integrated marketing communications media planners.Read More

Preference Minorities and the Internet

Published Research

Offline retailers face trading area and shelf space constraints, so they offer products tailored to the needs of the majority. Consumers whose preferences are dissimilar to the majority — “preference minorities” — are underserved offline and should be more likely to shop online. The authors use sales data from Diapers.com, the leading U.S. online retailer for baby diapers, to show why geographic variation in preference minority status of target customers explains geographic variation in online sales.Read More