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:
  • January-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: 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.

  • September-11: This paper will appear in the December issue of the Journal of Marketing Research. The 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.

  • 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.

  • March-11: Here is a new working paper looking at how piracy released before the theatrical opening weekend impacts box office revenue. We adapt the standard marketing models for predicting movie revenue to our setting by adding a variable for whether the movie was available on piracy networks before it was released in theaters. We find that pre-release piracy causes a 15% decline in the expected box office revenue for movies.