Category: marketing

Marketing.

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Windows Vista (teaching materials)

Edelman, Benjamin. “Windows Vista.” Harvard Business School Case 909-038, February 2009. (Revised December 2010.) (educator access at HBP. request a courtesy copy.)

Microsoft designs, modifies, publicizes, and distributes Windows Vista—against a backdrop of consumers already largely satisfied with their existing Windows XP systems. Microsoft must decide what features to include and what to drop, how to compete with its own installed base, and how to mobilize partners to offer Vista-compatible systems.

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Restaurant Promotions in 2015 (teaching materials)

Edelman, Benjamin. “Restaurant Promotions in 2015.” Harvard Business School Case 909-034, January 2009. (Revised July 2015.) (educator access at HBP. request a courtesy copy.)

A variety of services offer consumers discounts when dining at participating restaurants. This case examines four such services: Entertainment Book, Restaurant.com, Rewards Network, and Groupon. Despite key functional similarities, each of the services chooses an importantly different approach–different pricing, different benefits to consumers, different benefits to restaurants, and different underlying technologies.

Teaching Materials

Online Restaurant Promotions – Teaching Note (HBP 909063)

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Adverse Selection in Online ‘Trust’ Certifications

Edelman, Benjamin. “Adverse Selection in Online ‘Trust’ Certifications.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Commerce (2009): 205-212. (ACM International Conference Proceeding Series.)

Widely used online “trust” authorities issue certifications without substantial verification of recipients’ actual trustworthiness. This lax approach gives rise to adverse selection: the sites that seek and obtain trust certifications are actually less trustworthy than others. Using a new dataset on web site safety, I demonstrate that sites certified by the best-known authority, TRUSTe, are more than twice as likely to be untrustworthy as uncertified sites. This difference remains statistically and economically significant when restricted to “complex” commercial sites. In contrast, competing certification system BBBOnline imposes somewhat stricter requirements and appears to provide a certification of positive, albeit limited, value.

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Consumer Payment Systems — United States (teaching materials) with Andrei Hagiu

Edelman, Benjamin, and Andrei Hagiu. “Consumer Payment Systems — United States.” Harvard Business School Case 909-006, August 2008. (Revised July 2011.) (educator access at HBP. request a courtesy copy.)

In 2008, the U.S. consumer payments landscape was characterized by the ongoing prevalence of credit and debit card networks, the decline of checks, the rise of stored value cards, and the growth of new payment methods such as PayPal, Bill Me Later, and decoupled debit. This case presents the structure of these payment methods, focusing on incentives for both consumers and merchants, including direct costs, efficiency benefits, rebates, and treatment in case of loss or fraud.

Teaching Materials:

Consumer Payment Systems — United States and Japan – Teaching Note (HBP 909039)

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The Effect of Editorial Discretion Book Promotion on Sales at Amazon.com

Edelman, Benjamin. “The Effect of Editorial Discretion Book Promotion on Sales at Amazon.com.” 2002. (Winner of Seymour E. and Ruth B. Harris Prize for outstanding senior honors thesis in economics. Winner of Thomas T. Hoopes Prize awarded for outstanding scholarly work or research.)

A new dataset collected by the author allows estimation of the effect on book sales of promotional listing on Amazon’s editorial discretion pages. Following Goolsbee and Chevalier (2001), sales quantities are inferred from sales rank data freely available on Amazon’s web site, and an automated system tracks which books are promoted when, where, and how often. The results indicate that promotion of books on editorial discretion pages within Amazon’s web site yields increases in sales, and more frequent promotion of a book is associated with larger increases in sales. Increases in sales are greatest for newly-released hardcover books; increases are larger for childrens’ books, books in stock, and books more favorably priced at Amazon than at its foremost competitor, Barnes & Noble. Increases in sales are larger during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas than before or after the holiday season, and promotion has a larger effect when editorial discretion pages feature only a few books than when they feature many. Finally, the average short-run effect of promotion on one of Amazon’s editorial discretion pages is found to be roughly one third as large as the effect of an appearance in the New York Times Book Review, and the annual sum of Amazon’s editorial discretion promotional activities shows a total short-run impact on sales roughly three fifths as large as the totality of annual Times book reviews.