Tapping into the pulse of the market : essays on marketing implications of information flows

As the Internet continues to penetrate consumer households, online marketing is getting increasingly important for firms. By adapting to online strategies, firms are blessed (or doomed) with a plethora of new business models. The information flows created in the process poses both opportunities and challenges for marketers. On one hand, information flows captured online are usually easier to be stored and processed, thus empowering firms to be better informed about the consumers or the market itself. On the other hand, how to use the information flows to make the correct managerial decisions is still a challenging task for managers and academics alike. My dissertation studies the marketing implications of these information flows. Broad as the research question is, my dissertation focuses on specific market settings. I adopt both analytical and empirical methodologies to study information flows in these markets. Overall, this dissertation concludes that information flows can engender new market mechanisms, can provide valuable information of unobservable market forces, and can be created to improve social welfare. Essay 1: Innovation Incentives for Information Goods. Digital goods can be reproduced costlessly.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Zhang, Xiaoquan (Xiaoquan Michael)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Erik Brynjolfsson.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37255

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37255