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Contact
Information: H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management and Tepper School of Business Carnegie Mellon University 4800 Forbes Avenue, HBH 2105D Pittsburgh PA, 15217 Email: 
Voice: 412-268-5978 Fax: 412-268-5338 Office: Hamburg Hall 2105D Assistant: Gretchen Hunter (Hamburg Hall 2101, 412-268-6076) |
New:
- May-09: I’ve been selected by our Masters of
Information Systems Management students (thanks
everyone!) to give the faculty address at commencement.
- April-09: Here is a new paper analyzing the impact of
NBC’s decision to remove their content from
iTunes on demand for their content through piracy and
DVD channels. Using piracy on ABC, CBS, and FOX
content as a control, we find that NBC’s removal
from iTunes led to an 11.5% increase in piracy on
their content. On a unit basis, this increase was more
than twice as large as the daily sales NBC received
through iTunes before removal. Moreover, we see no
increase in DVD sales for NBC’s television box
sets after removal.
- March-09: This paper has been accepted for publication
at Information Systems Research. The paper looks at
how the importance of network effects might change in
the context of purely digital goods that can be easily
converted from one format to another. We develop a
model of sequential duopoly competition and
proprietary technology standards. We find that unless
network effects are very large, firms will provide
converters to all consumers. This makes both the
entrant and incumbent better off since the provision
of converters alleviates price competition in the
market.
- February-09: Here is an updated version of a paper that looks
at the impact of increased broadband Internet
penetration on DVD sales. Studios have been concerned
that the dominant impact of increased broadband
penetration would be increased piracy and lower DVD
sales. We use local (DMA) level data to show that, in
contrast to these concerns, increased broadband
penetration is correlated with increased DVD sales.
- January-09: This paper has been conditionally accepted
at Quantitative Marketing and Economics. The paper
analyzes search costs among users of an Internet
shopbot. This paper finds that shopbot users face
relatively high costs associated with searching and
processing information displayed on the site.
- November-08: Here is an updated version of a paper that uses a
hierarchical Bayesian model to analyze the impact of
position on profitability within sponsored search
results at Google. We find that while the first
position within sponsored search results generates the
highest click-throughs, it is not necessarily the most
profitable position. We use an analytic model to argue
that this could be because of heterogeneity in search
costs across consumers and the additional browsing
cost incurred in evaluating products across multiple
websites.
- November-08: Some of my research on Internet
marketing and pricing was quoted in this press story on the impact of the
supreme court’s decision on manufacturers
ability to impose minimum advertised pricing (MAP)
policies on online retailers.
- September-08: My research into the long tail was
featured on the CMU home page. The permanent link for the
story is here.
- September-08: This paper examining personalization
strategies available to Internet firms has been
accepted for publication by the Journal of Interactive
Marketing
- August-08: Our paper examining the impact of
television broadcasts on DVD sales and Internet piracy
has been accepted for publication at MIS Quarterly. In
the paper, we use a new dataset and find that
television broadcasts of movies result in an immediate
increase in the demand for DVDs of that movie and in
the demand for pirated copies of that movie. However,
we also find that the presence of pirated material at
the time of broadcast does not reduce the demand for
DVDs. That is, consumers who are interested in
purchasing the DVD, are not dissuaded from that
purchase by the presence of pirated material for the
movies in our sample.
- July-08: Here is an updated version of a paper using
shopbot data to infer consumer search costs in online
markets. We find that consumers face high costs to
search for information online, even in the
“nearly perfect” market of the shopbot.
- June-08: Here is an updated version of a paper that uses data from the flash memory market to empirically show that the presence of digital converters reduced the price premium of leading flash memory card formats. This made producers of non-dominant standards better off. We argue that this had various positive benefits for the market, including increased the overall product variety.