Purpose To encourage buyers to contribute product reviews, some online sellers offer monetary rewards. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of monetary rewards on buyers’ purchase decisions and review contributions, as well as the impact on the seller’s price decisions and profit. Design/methodology/approach The authors consider an online seller in a two-stage setting. Prior to Stage 1, the profit-maximizing seller sets the price and decides whether to offer a monetary reward secretly to motivate online reviews. Then, a continuum of buyers arrives and makes purchase decisions at the beginning of each stage. First-stage buyers may contribute reviews if they are satisfied, which will affect demand in the second stage. Using this analytical framework, the authors analyze the impact of monetary rewards. Findings If the monetary reward is small, it decreases the seller’s profit and fails to generate more reviews. It also increases price, leading to a decline in total demand. Thus, when the reward is lower than a certain threshold, all buyers are worse off. Only when the reward exceeds the threshold are buyers who contribute reviews better off. Profit and total demand both increase in review quality, while the price may either increase or decrease in it. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to analyze theoretically the impact of monetary rewards on buyers’ purchase decisions, review contributions and on online sellers’ decisions.

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By considering a two‐segment consumer market, we investigate the impact of selling formats on the adoption of personalized pricing (PP). We find that (i) when the valuation of the two segments is (not) close, PP is more likely to be implemented under the wholesale (agency) model; (ii) when the high‐type segment is relatively large (small), the likelihood of PP is higher (lower) under the agency model; (iii) the likelihood is non‐monotonic in the size of the high‐type segment and low‐type consumers' valuation; (iv) the player that bears the cost of PP is better off when the adoption becomes more costly.