Book Reviews

Markwood, Priscilla S.

doi:10.1087/20100313

Cited by 9 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…Burgess and Green's (2009) early study found that the most popular content on the platform was split in a roughly equal fashion between what they term 'vernacular producers' (amateurs) and commercial producers. But if we consider how the former vastly outnumber the latter, it suggests what tends to be called a long tail distribution: the vast majority of the content produced by vernacular producers achieves little visibility (Anderson 2006). Research on other platforms has similarly found what Rogers (2013: loc 769) describes as a 'tiny ratio of editors to users', often described in terms of a 'power law' (Marres 2017: 148).…”

Section: The Reality Of Online Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Public and Their Platforms

Carrigan¹,

Fatsis²

2021

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Section: The Reality Of Online Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Public and Their Platforms

Carrigan¹,

Fatsis²

2021

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“…Both of these papers examine the book industry and assume that book sales can be represented by a power law. It is common for books to be considered as one of the industries where sales follow a power law as described by Anderson (2006) in his bestseller “The Long Tail.”…”

Section: Genesis Of Using Ranks To Predict Salesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The challenges of using ranks to estimate sales

Liebowitz

Zentner

2023

Economics Manag Strategy

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Researchers have frequently used data on product ranks to estimate nonpublic sales quantities, believing that there is a power‐law‐induced linear relationship between logged sales ranks and logged sales. Using essentially complete data on book sales, the most commonly used product in this literature, we find that the (double‐logged) relationship between sales ranks and quantity sold is not linear, but robustly concave. We demonstrate that this concavity is likely to cause very poor sales predictions in many instances. We provide two concrete examples where applying this linear method to the concave relationship has led to serious errors in sales estimates. First, in the claim that the Internet's greater product variety in books has a large positive impact on social welfare, and second, in a claim about relative sales levels in top 20 and top 50 music “charts.” We also explore the use of nonlinear specifications as an alternative method to predict sales from ranks and find a simple specification that provides much better sales estimates. Finally, we examine the possibility that a particular type of biased sample might allow reasonable linear estimates of industry sales and conclude that it is possible but quite unlikely.

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“…The search may return a large number of results that require the consumers to look through by reading each product information webpage. When help, such as recommender systems, is available, consumers can more easily find and evaluate the substitute products, thus incurring lower product evaluation costs (Anderson, 2008; Brynjolfsson et al., 2011; De Bruyn et al., 2008).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Let them stay or let them go? Online retailer pricing strategy for managing stockouts

Zhang

Dearden

Yao

2022

Production and Operations Management

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A challenge for online retail firms is managing stockouts of products when substitutes are available. We develop a game‐theoretic model to analyze the competition between multiple‐product online firms and characterize the scenarios when they can use prices as stockout recovery mechanisms. Depending on the consumer costs of searching for unfamiliar substitute products on their sites and the consumer mismatch costs of shopping at backup compared to favorite firms, in our primary analysis, we demonstrate that the equilibrium of a pricing game can be one of three possible types: Following stockouts the firms retain their customers, the firms release their customers, or all consumers turn to one of the firms. We also examine a firm's combined use of prices and product recommender systems to manage stockouts. Results in the primary section of the analysis and a first extension combine to demonstrate a firm's strategic marketing complementarity of its prices and quality of its product recommender system. That is, when a firm uses a better product recommender system to retain consumers following stockouts, we show that it also raises prices. In our primary section, we also show that by implementing a better product recommender system, surprisingly a firm's sales may fall. However, implementing higher quality recommender systems may not be jointly optimal for the firms. In the first extension's game, depending on the cost of better product recommender systems, the firms, when choosing recommender systems, may engage in a prisoner's dilemma, where the price increase associated cannot fully compensate the implementation cost. In a second extension, we show that positively (negatively) correlated stockouts of a product between the competitors reduces (raises) each firm's profit and prices because the positive (negative) correlation reduces (raises) each consumer's expected utility of shopping experience.

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Book Reviews

Abstract: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More Chris Anderson Hyperion, 2006, 236 pp. ISBN 104013‐0237‐8, $24.95 Free: The Future of a Radical Price Chris Anderson Hyperion, 2009, ISBN 978‐1‐4013‐2290‐8, $26.95

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

The Public and Their Platforms

The Public and Their Platforms

The challenges of using ranks to estimate sales

Let them stay or let them go? Online retailer pricing strategy for managing stockouts

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