Evolution of Internet Retailing and Buy vs. Make Decisions

Funded Research Proposal

We have obtained data from Digital Commerce 360 which publishes pertinent statistics on top 1000 internet retail sites. One interesting aspect of this data is detailed information regarding outsourcing/insourcing decisions including web hosting, search engine optimization services, product delivery etc. This is a pretty unique data spanning hundreds of companies and a last decade. We wish to use this data to analyze outsourcing decisions of internet retailers and how these choices affect their performance. The data shows variation across time and industries, and it is supplemented with many quantitative metrics for internet retailers including number of visitors, conversion rate and basket size etc. We believe this unique data will allow us to gain unique insights into make vs buy decisions by internet retailers.Read More

Is Tom Cruise Threatened? An Empirical Study of the Impact of Product Variety on Demand Concentration

Published Research

We empirically examine the impact of expanded product variety on demand concentration using large data sets from the movie rental industry as our test bed. We find that product variety is likely to increase demand concentration.Read More