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Anindya Ghose

    Anindya Ghose

    • Anindya Ghose is a Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences and a Professor of Marketing at New Y... moreedit
    In the past few years, we have witnessed the increasing ubiquity of user-generated content on seller reputation and product condition in Internet-based used-good markets. Recent theoretical models of trading and sorting in used-good... more
    In the past few years, we have witnessed the increasing ubiquity of user-generated content on seller reputation and product condition in Internet-based used-good markets. Recent theoretical models of trading and sorting in used-good markets provide testable predictions to use to examine the presence of adverse selection and trade patterns in such dynamic markets. A key aspect of such empirical analyses
    ABSTRACT Online platforms offer access to a larger social group than is generally available through offline contacts, making the internet an emerging venue for seeking casual sex partners. The ease of seeking sex partners through... more
    ABSTRACT Online platforms offer access to a larger social group than is generally available through offline contacts, making the internet an emerging venue for seeking casual sex partners. The ease of seeking sex partners through classified ad sites may promote risky behaviors that increase transmission of STDs. In this paper, using a natural experiment set up, we investigate whether the entry of a major online personals ad site, Craigslist, increases the prevalence of HIV over an 11 year period from 1998 to 2008 across 33 states in the United States. After controlling for extraneous factors, our results suggest that the entry of Craigslist is related to a 39.5 percent increase in HIV cases. Our analysis suggests that the site entry produces an average of 3944 to 5170 cases of HIV infection in the U.S. each year, mapping out to $39.9 million to $52.3 million dollars in annual treatment costs. It is also estimated that one case of HIV infection arises from every 125 to 164 ads posted on the website. In addition, the analyses reveal that non-market related casual sex is the primary driver of the increase in HIV cases, in contrast to paid transactions (e.g., escort services and prostitution) solicited on the site which has a negative relationship with HIV trends. These findings are essential to the understanding of the social routes through which HIV transmission takes place and the extent to which site entry can influence HIV trends. Implications for healthcare practitioners and policy makers are discussed.
    ... DOI Bookmark: 10.1287/mksc.1090.0552. ABSTRACT. The phenomenon of paid search advertising has now become the most predominant form of online advertising in the marketing world. However, we have little understanding ...
    ABSTRACT Price dispersion is an important indicator of market efficiency. Internet-based electronic markets have the potential to reduce transaction and search costs, thereby creating more efficient, “frictionless,” markets as predicted... more
    ABSTRACT Price dispersion is an important indicator of market efficiency. Internet-based electronic markets have the potential to reduce transaction and search costs, thereby creating more efficient, “frictionless,” markets as predicted by theories in information economics. However, prior work has reported significant levels of price dispersion on the Internet, which is in contrast to theoretical predictions. A key feature of the existing stream of work has been its use of posted prices to estimate price dispersion. In theory, this can lead to an overestimation of price dispersion because a sale may not have occurred at the posted price. In this research, we use a unique dataset of actual transaction prices collected from both the electronic and offline markets of buyers in a B2B market to evaluate the extent of price dispersion. We find that price dispersion in the electronic market is as low as 0.22%, which is substantially less than those reported in the existing literature. This near-zero price dispersion suggests that in some electronic markets the “law of one price” can prevail when we consider transaction prices instead of posted prices. We further develop a theoretical framework that identifies several new drivers of price dispersion using transaction data. In particular, we focus on four product-level and market-level attributes – product cost, order cycle time, own price elasticity and transaction quantity, and estimate their impact on price dispersion. We also examine the electronic market's moderating role in the relationship between these drivers and price dispersion. Finally, we estimate the efficiency gains accruing from transactions in the relatively friction-free market and find that the electronic market can enhances consumer surplus by as much as $97.92 million per year.
    Increasingly, user-generated product reviews, images and tags serve as a valuable source of information for customers making product choices online. An extant stream of work has looked at the economic impact of reviews. Typically, the... more
    Increasingly, user-generated product reviews, images and tags serve as a valuable source of information for customers making product choices online. An extant stream of work has looked at the economic impact of reviews. Typically, the impact of product reviews has been incorporated by numeric variables representing the valence and volume of reviews. In this paper, we posit that the information
    Page 1. The Impact of Location on Consumer Purchases in Electronic Markets 2nd Statistical Challenges in E-Commerce Research Symposium Chris Forman Tepper School of Business Carnegie Mellon University Anindya Ghose Stern School of... more
    Page 1. The Impact of Location on Consumer Purchases in Electronic Markets 2nd Statistical Challenges in E-Commerce Research Symposium Chris Forman Tepper School of Business Carnegie Mellon University Anindya Ghose Stern School of Business New York University ...
    Research Interests:
    The growing pervasiveness of the Internet has changed the way that consumers shop for goods. Increasingly, user-generated product reviews serve as a valuable source of information for customers making product choices online. While there... more
    The growing pervasiveness of the Internet has changed the way that consumers shop for goods. Increasingly, user-generated product reviews serve as a valuable source of information for customers making product choices online. While there is a significant body of theory on multi-attribute choice under uncertainty, the literature that examines product reviews has not built on this stream of theory for
    It is well known that the Internet has significantly reduced consumers’ search costs online. But relatively little is known about how search costs affect consumer demand structure in online markets. In this paper, we identify the impact... more
    It is well known that the Internet has significantly reduced consumers’ search costs online. But relatively little is known about how search costs affect consumer demand structure in online markets. In this paper, we identify the impact of search costs on firm competition and market structure by exploring a unique theoretical insight that search costs create a kink in aggregate
    With the rapid growth of the Internet, the ability of users to create and publish content has created active electronic communities that provide a wealth of product information. However, the high volume of reviews that are typically... more
    With the rapid growth of the Internet, the ability of users to create and publish content has created active electronic communities that provide a wealth of product information. However, the high volume of reviews that are typically published for a single product makes harder for individuals as well as manufacturers to locate the best reviews and understand the true underlying
    With the rapid growth of the Internet, users' ability to publish content has created active electronic com- munities that provide a wealth of product information. Consumers naturally gravitate to reading reviews in order to decide... more
    With the rapid growth of the Internet, users' ability to publish content has created active electronic com- munities that provide a wealth of product information. Consumers naturally gravitate to reading reviews in order to decide whether to buy a product. However, the high volume of reviews that are typically pub- lished for a single product makes it harder for individuals
    We present a framework for identifying the different dimensions of online reputation and characterizingtheir influence on the pricing power of sellers. Our theory predicts that sellers with better recorded onlinereputation can... more
    We present a framework for identifying the different dimensions of online reputation and characterizingtheir influence on the pricing power of sellers. Our theory predicts that sellers with better recorded onlinereputation can successfully charge higher prices than competing sellers of identical products, and that theirpricing power increases with their recorded level of experience. We develop and implement a new text miningtechnique
    Deriving the polarity and strength of opinions is an important research topic, attracting sig- nificant attention over the last few years. In this work, to measure the strength and po- larity of an opinion, we consider the eco- nomic... more
    Deriving the polarity and strength of opinions is an important research topic, attracting sig- nificant attention over the last few years. In this work, to measure the strength and po- larity of an opinion, we consider the eco- nomic context in which the opinion is eval- uated, instead of using human annotators or linguistic resources. We rely on the fact
    ... 18 Page 2. have also begun investing heavily in search engine optimization (SEO) to improve their organic search results, either in addition or in lieu of search engine marketing (SEM). SEO refers to the process of tailoring a ...
    ... Hence, it is now considered to be among the most effective marketing vehicles available in the online world.1 Despite the ... Given the shift in advertising from traditional banner advertising tosearch engine advertising, an... more
    ... Hence, it is now considered to be among the most effective marketing vehicles available in the online world.1 Despite the ... Given the shift in advertising from traditional banner advertising tosearch engine advertising, an understanding of the determinants of conversion rates and ...
    The phenomenon of sponsored search advertising - where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (non-sponsored) web search results - is gaining ground as the largest source of revenues for search... more
    The phenomenon of sponsored search advertising - where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (non-sponsored) web search results - is gaining ground as the largest source of revenues for search engines. Using a unique 6 month panel dataset of several hundred keywords collected from a large nationwide retailer that advertises on Google, we
    n many industries, Internet referral services, hosted either by independent third-party infomediaries or by manufacturers, serve as digitally enabled lead generators in electronic markets, directing consumer traffic to downstream... more
    n many industries, Internet referral services, hosted either by independent third-party infomediaries or by manufacturers, serve as digitally enabled lead generators in electronic markets, directing consumer traffic to downstream retailers in a distribution network. This reshapes the extended enterprise from the traditional net- work of upstream manufacturers and downstream retailers to include midstream third-party and manufacturer- owned referral services in
    We develop an analytical framework to investigate the competitive implications of personal- ized pricing (PP), whereby firms charge different prices to different consumers, based on their willingness to pay. We embed personalized pricing... more
    We develop an analytical framework to investigate the competitive implications of personal- ized pricing (PP), whereby firms charge different prices to different consumers, based on their willingness to pay. We embed personalized pricing in a model of vertical product differentiation, and show how it affects firms' choices over quality. We show that firms' optimal pricing strate- gies with PP may
    ABSTRACT Online platforms offer access to a larger social group than is generally available through offline contacts, making the internet an emerging venue for seeking casual sex partners. The ease of seeking sex partners through... more
    ABSTRACT Online platforms offer access to a larger social group than is generally available through offline contacts, making the internet an emerging venue for seeking casual sex partners. The ease of seeking sex partners through classified ad sites may promote risky behaviors that increase transmission of STDs. In this paper, using a natural experiment set up, we investigate whether the entry of a major online personals ad site, Craigslist, increases the prevalence of HIV over a 10 year period from 1999 to 2008 across 33 states in the United States. After controlling for extraneous factors, our results suggest that the entry of Craigslist is related to a 15.9 percent increase in HIV cases. Our analysis suggests that the site entry produces an average of 6130 to 6455 cases of HIV infection in the U.S. each year, mapping out to $62 million to $65.3 million in annual treatment costs. In addition, the analyses reveal that non-market related casual sex is the primary driver of the increase in HIV cases, in contrast to paid transactions solicited on the site (e.g., escort services and prostitution) which has a negative relationship with HIV trends. These findings are essential to the understanding of the social routes through which HIV transmission takes place and the extent to which site entry can influence HIV trends. Implications for healthcare practitioners and policy makers are discussed.
    Research Interests:
    ABSTRACT We analyze patterns of online lending between individuals using data drawn from Kiva, a global crowd-funding platform that facilitates pro-social (peer-to-peer) lending. Our analysis, which employs a data set capturing more than... more
    ABSTRACT We analyze patterns of online lending between individuals using data drawn from Kiva, a global crowd-funding platform that facilitates pro-social (peer-to-peer) lending. Our analysis, which employs a data set capturing more than three million individual lending transactions between 2005 and 2010, considers the dual roles of geographic and cultural distance on lenders’ decisions about which borrowers to support. Although cultural differences have seen extensive study in the IT literature as sources of friction in extended interactions, we argue and demonstrate their role in individuals’ selection of an online transaction partner. We find evidence that lenders do prefer culturally similar borrowers. An analysis of marginal effects indicates that an increase of one standard deviation in cultural differences would be associated with approximately 430 fewer lending actions, at the average, for a given pair of countries; (a loss of more than $10,000). We further find that lenders treat cultural differences and physical distance as substitutes. A one standard deviation increase in physical distance is associated with a 25% decline in the cultural effect, at the average. Finally, we offer some empirical evidence of the potential for IT-based trust mechanisms to overcome culture’s effects, considering, in particular, Kiva’s reputation rating system for micro-finance partners. We discuss the implications of our findings for pro-social lending, online crowd-funding, and electronic markets more broadly.
    Research Interests:
    Page 1. Social network collaborative filtering RONG ZHENG, DENNIS WILKINSON & FOSTER PROVOST1 _____ ... However, SNCF using "ally" alters is competitive with CF. ...
    Research Interests:
    Three of the most important uses of the Internet today are as an economic marketplace, as aforum for social interaction, and as a source of information. In this paper, we explore how thesethree activities come together, in the form of... more
    Three of the most important uses of the Internet today are as an economic marketplace, as aforum for social interaction, and as a source of information. In this paper, we explore how thesethree activities come together, in the form of emergent social communities built around informationexchanges within IT-enabled electronic marketplaces. Drawing on social identity theory, we suggestthat the relationship between
    We develop a game-theoretical framework to investigate the competitive implications of Consumer-to-Consumer electronic marketplaces, which promote concurrent selling of new and used goods. In many e-marketplaces, where suppliers cannot... more
    We develop a game-theoretical framework to investigate the competitive implications of Consumer-to-Consumer electronic marketplaces, which promote concurrent selling of new and used goods. In many e-marketplaces, where suppliers cannot directly use second-hand goods for practicing inter-temporal price discrimination, the threat of cannibalization of new goods by used goods become significant. We examine conditions under when it is optimal for suppliers
    Abstract We develop a game-theoretic framework to investigate the competitive implications of consumer-to-consumer electronic marketplaces, which promote concurrent selling of new and used goods. In many e-marketplaces, where suppliers... more
    Abstract We develop a game-theoretic framework to investigate the competitive implications of consumer-to-consumer electronic marketplaces, which promote concurrent selling of new and used goods. In many e-marketplaces, where suppliers cannot directly use second-hand goods for practicing inter-temporal price discrimination, the threat of cannibalization of new goods by used goods become significant. We examine conditions under which it is optimal for suppliers to operate in such markets, explaining why used-goods markets may not be ...
    Research Interests:

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