Contact Information:

H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management
and Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon University
4800 Forbes Avenue, HBH 3028
Pittsburgh PA, 15217
Email:
Voice: 412-268-5978
Fax: 412-268-5338
Office: Hamburg Hall 3028
Assistant: Gretchen Hunter (Hamburg Hall 3007,
412-268-6076)

New:
  • May-12: Earlier this semester I had the pleasure of speaking at a CMU Veritas Forum where I was asked to provide a Christian perspective on the meaning of work. The video from that forum is now available on the web. You can view my portion here.

  • April-12: This paper was featured in the Marketing Science Institute’s “MSI Selections” publication. The publication is designed to highlight research from leading marketing journals that is “most likely to be important to the practice of marketing.” Our paper studies the revenue that firms receive from Google AdWords auctions as a function of position and finds that while advertisements higher position advertisements get more clicks than lower position ads do, it’s not necessarily the case that higher position ads are best in terms of revenue.

  • March-12: Our paper on the HADOPI law in France was picked up by the French newspaper Le Monde, and criticized under the argument that iPhone sales could explain the effect we were seeing. We went back and updated our analysis based on their concerns and concluded that it is extremely unlikely that iPhone sales are driving our results. The updated paper, including an appendix explaining our response to the iPhone concerns, is available here.

  • February-12: This paper looks at how consumer purchasing patterns change when they move from physical stores (with limited stocking capacity) to online outlets. We do this using transaction data from a large video chain. We use the closing of a consumer’s local video store as an exogenous shock to the cost of renting through the physical channel and find that when consumers move from physical to online channels they are significantly more likely to rent “niche” titles relative to “blockbusters.”

  • January-12: I had a chance to speak at a Congressional Internet Caucus panel on “The Clouding of Entertainment Media.” The video is available here.

  • January-12: This paper analyzes the impact of organic search results on the effectiveness of sponsored search listings, using data from a field experiment conducted for an Adwords advertiser. Our results show that “competitor listings in organic results have a higher impact on click performance than competitor listings in sponsored results do.”

  • January-12: This paper analyzes the impact of France’s HADOPI “3 strikes” anti-piracy law on music sales. We find that HADOPI caused a 22.5% increase in song sales and a 25% increase in album sales relative to sales in a control group of countries. We also find that the impact of HADOPI occurred primarily during the time period when the law was being discussed in the French press (and searched for by French citizens on the Internet), a period before the law was enacted and well before any notices were sent to individuals caught violating the law.

  • December-11: This paper appeared in this month’s issue of the Journal of Management Information Systems. The paper describes an empirical method for measuring information diffusion in online social networks and applies this method to a dataset obtained from Last.FM.

  • November-11: Rahul Telang and I co-authored an editorial in a Capitol Hill newspaper that was later picked up in TechDirt. The editorial states that the movie industry would benefit by making their content available sooner in International markets (where it is typically delayed relative to the U.S. release). Our results show that “every week customers have to wait before they can buy a DVD translates into on average 1.8% lower DVD sales” in that country. These results are analogous to our prior work showing that NBC’s decision to remove their television content from iTunes resulted in an 11% increase in piracy on NBC content.

  • November-11: This new working paper uses a natural experiment to analyze how ebook distribution impacts print book sales. We find that delaying the release of ebooks relative to print release dates results in a very small (and statistically insignificant) increase in print sales, but a large decrease in ebook sales and overall sales. Our results suggest that channel choice precedes product choice in the minds of most book consumers, and that publishers would benefit by making ebooks available alongside the print release.

  • October-11: This paper has been accepted for publication at Management Information Systems Quarterly. The paper empirically analyzes whether the increased presence of digital converters reduces network externalities in hardware markets for flash memory cards. We find that the presence of digital converters has reduced the price premium of leading flash memory formats relative to lesser know formats.

  • July-11: This is a new working paper analyzing how information discovery during the HBO broadcast window changes the distribution of movie consumption. We find that broadcasting a movie on HBO increases sales of all movies -- but results in a disproportionately large increase in “long tail” movie sales.

  • June-11: Rahul Telang and I have been awarded a Google Faculty Research Award for our work into the impact of piracy on movie sales.