Knowledge that Transforms

This paper studies information sharing in a distribution channel where the manufacturer possesses better demand-forecast information than the downstream retailer. We examine three information-sharing formats: no information sharing (i.e., the manufacturer ex ante commits to not sharing its forecast), voluntary information sharing (i.e., the manufacturer makes the sharing decision ex post after receiving the forecast), and mandatory information sharing (i.e., the manufacturer is mandated to share its forecast). We characterize the equilibrium outcomes under the three sharing formats and investigate the firms’ preferences regarding these formats. It is shown that when the retailer is risk-neutral, both firms are indifferent between voluntary and mandatory sharing. Among the three formats, ex ante, the retailer prefers the no-sharing format whereas the manufacturer prefers the mandatory-sharing format. In addition, we find that a more accurate forecast benefits both firms under voluntary- and mandatory-sharing formats, but may hurt both firms under the no-sharing format. Finally, we show that risk aversion plays a critical role in the firms’ sharing decisions and the impact of forecast accuracy. Specifically, when the retailer is risk-averse, the manufacturer may prefer the no-sharing format over the voluntary-sharing format, and improving forecast accuracy may hurt both firms even under voluntary sharing.

This paper examines the incentives of firms to invest in socially responsible product innovations. Our analysis connects the existence of socially responsible innovations to the presence of intrinsic and extrinsic social responsibility preferences. In addition to deriving economic value from the product, consumers have heterogeneous intrinsic needs to consume products that are socially responsible. They also have extrinsic social comparison preferences that are based on their meetings with others in social interactions. The frequency of these meetings are endogenous to the consumption choices of consumers. A consumer enjoys a social comparison benefit if her consumption decision is more socially responsible than the consumer that she meets in a social interaction and a social comparison cost if it is less socially responsible. The analysis reveals a nonmonotonic effect of social comparison effects on innovation incentives. When the economic value of a product is relatively small, the incentive to innovate decreases as social comparison effects increase. By contrast, when the economic value of a product is sufficiently large, increases in social comparison effects increase the incentive to innovate. Social comparison benefits and costs have different effects on competition between firms. In particular, social comparison benefits soften price competition, whereas social comparison costs tend to exacerbate price competition. We also identify market conditions where a monopoly invests more or less compared to a firm facing competition.

A seller often needs to determine the amount of product information to provide to consumers. We model costly consumer information search in the presence of limited information. We derive the consumer’s optimal stopping rule for the search process. We find that, in general, there is an intermediate amount of information that maximizes the likelihood of purchase. If too much information is provided, some of it is not as useful for the purchase decision, the average informativeness per search occasion is too low, and consumers end up choosing not to purchase the product. If too little information is provided, consumers may end up not having sufficient information to decide to purchase the product. The optimal amount of information increases with the consumer’s ex ante valuation of the product, because with greater ex ante valuation by the consumer, the firm wants to offer sufficient information for the consumer to be less likely to run out of information to check. One can also show that there is an intermediate amount of information that maximizes the consumer’s expected utility from the search problem (social welfare under some assumptions). Furthermore, this amount may be smaller than that which maximizes the probability of purchase; that is, the market outcome may lead to information overload with respect to the social welfare optimum. This paper can be seen as providing conditions under which too much information may hurt consumer decision making. Numerical analysis shows also that if consumers can choose to some extent which attributes to search through (but not perfectly), or if the firm can structure the information searched by consumers, the amount of information that maximizes the probability of purchase increases, but is close to the amount of information that maximizes the probability of purchase when the consumer cannot costlessly choose which attributes to search through.

We study three ways firms can communicate about their brands—paid media (advertising), earned media (word of mouth and online social media), and owned media (brand websites and other owned content)—and the roles these media types play in reminding (i.e., activating memory), informing (i.e., learning their tastes for the brand), or enhancing enjoyment (e.g., gaining additional utility from socializing about the brand). We do this for a new TV show setting using a data set that contains reported viewing, exposures, expectations, and experiences. We present descriptive analyses and results from a new structural model, which indicate that earned media is more impactful than paid and owned media per exposure. However, paid media has far more exposures, so for a given percentage increase, paid media’s influence dominates earned and owned media. Earned media operate primarily through enhancing enjoyment, whereas paid media operate through reminding and owned media through reminding, but discourage live viewing. We find that media exposures help consumers learn about how well they will like the program. However, this learning can either increase or decrease the expected liking, and in our data the average audience effects are negligible. Overall, we find that earned and paid media play a central role in developing and maintaining entertainment brands.