Explore the vast range of titles available.

We study strategic communication between a customer and an advisor who is privately informed about the most suitable choice for the customer but whose preferences are misaligned with the customer's preferences. The advisor sends a message to the customer who, in turn, can secure herself from bad advice by acquiring costly information on her own. In our experiments, we find that making the customer's information acquisition less costly leads to less prosocial behavior of the advisor. This can be explained by a model of shared guilt, which predicts a shift in causal attribution of guilt from the advisor to the customer if the latter could have avoided her ex post disappointment. We conclude that providing better access to information through, for example, consumer protection regulation or digital information aggregation and dissemination, may have unintended negative consequences on peoples' willingness to take responsibility for each other.

•Personalization leads to greater click-through when firms use overt data collection.•Covert methods increase customer vulnerability resulting in lower click-through.•Negative outcomes can be mitigated by posting ads on trusted websites.•Signaling trust through information icons can also offset this negative effect. Retailers gather data about customers’ online behavior to develop personalized service offers. Greater personalization typically increases service relevance and customer adoption, but paradoxically, it also may increase customers’ sense of vulnerability and lower adoption rates. To demonstrate this contradiction, an exploratory field study on Facebook and secondary data about a personalized advertising campaign indicate sharp drops in click-through rates when customers realize their personal information has been collected without their consent. To investigate the personalization paradox, this study uses three experiments that confirm a firm's strategy for collecting information from social media websites is a crucial determinant of how customers react to online personalized advertising. When firms engage in overt information collection, participants exhibit greater click-through intentions in response to more personalized advertisements, in contrast with their reactions when firms collect information covertly. This effect reflects the feelings of vulnerability that consumers experience when firms undertake covert information collection strategies. Trust-building marketing strategies that transfer trust from another website or signal trust with informational cues can offset this negative effect. These studies help unravel the personalization paradox by explicating the role of information collection and its impact on vulnerability and click-through rates.

Accelerators aim to help nascent companies reach successful outcomes by providing capital, enabling industry connections, and increasing exposure to investors. Critically, however, accelerators also provide informative signals to founders about the probability of success. Founders use this information to decide whether to continue or shut down. To better understand these issues, I provide a model of accelerator participation and performance and then test empirical predictions from the model using a novel data set of approximately 900 accelerator companies across 13 accelerators and 900 matched nonaccelerator companies. I find that, through accelerator feedback effects, accelerator companies close down earlier and more often, raise less money conditional on closing, and appear to be more efficient investments compared with non-accelerator companies. Additional analysis using a separate sample of rejected accelerator applicants further supports these findings. These results suggest that accelerators help resolve uncertainty around company quality sooner, allowing founders to make funding and exit decisions accordingly. This paper was accepted by Ashish Arora, entrepreneurship and innovation.

We consider an entrepreneur who designs a reward-based crowdfunding campaign when the campaign provides a signal about the future demand for the product and subsequent venture capital is needed. We find that both the informativeness of the campaign and considerations related to gaining access to venture capital funding affect the entrepreneur’s choice of campaign instruments, as well as her decision of whether to run a campaign. In particular, entrepreneurs should launch the campaign either when it is highly informative or when it is not informative at all. For relatively low levels of informativeness, but not so low that the venture capitalist (VC) completely ignores the campaign outcome in his funding decision, our study suggests that the entrepreneur might forgo the opportunity of acquiring information via crowdfunding because the benefits of crowdfunding are insufficient to offset the risk of campaign failure. We also find that the preference of entrepreneurs in favor of crowdfunding is stronger than that of VCs. For backers, we point out that in addition to the risk inherent in new product development, they should be cognizant of the risk that successful campaigns do not guarantee subsequent VC funding. As the use of crowdfunding platforms becomes more prevalent for entrepreneurial projects, our study offers a deeper understanding of the dual role of reward-based crowdfunding in terms of acquiring demand information and raising capital for early-stage start-ups. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2018.0777 .

Motivated by the proliferation of online platforms that collect and disseminate consumers’ experiences with alternative substitutable products/services, we investigate the problem of optimal information provision when the goal is to maximize aggregate consumer surplus. We develop a decentralized multiarmed bandit framework where a forward-looking principal (the platform designer) commits up front to a policy that dynamically discloses information regarding the history of outcomes to a series of short-lived rational agents (the consumers). We demonstrate that consumer surplus is nonmonotone in the accuracy of the designer’s information-provision policy. Because consumers are constantly in “exploitation” mode, policies that disclose accurate information on past outcomes suffer from inadequate “exploration.” We illustrate how the designer can (partially) alleviate this inefficiency by employing a policy that strategically obfuscates the information in the platform’s possession; interestingly, such a policy is beneficial despite the fact that consumers are aware of both the designer’s objective and the precise way by which information is being disclosed to them. More generally, we show that the optimal information-provision policy can be obtained as the solution of a large-scale linear program. Noting that such a solution is typically intractable, we use our structural findings to design an intuitive heuristic that underscores the value of information obfuscation in decentralized learning. We further highlight that obfuscation remains beneficial even if the designer can directly incentivize consumers to explore through monetary payments. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.

We integrate tools to monitor information acquisition in field experiments on discrimination and examine whether gaps arise already when decision makers choose the effort level for reading an application. In both countries we study, negatively stereotyped minority names reduce employers' effort to inspect resumes. In contrast, minority names increase information acquisition in the rental housing market. Both results are consistent with a model of endogenous allocation of costly attention, which magnifies the role of prior beliefs and preferences beyond the one considered in standard models of discrimination. The findings have implications for magnitude of discrimination, returns to human capital and policy.

This paper models the optimal search strategies of the unemployed across space to characterize local labor markets. Our methodology allows for linkages between numerous areas, while preserving tractability. We estimate that labor markets are quite local, as the attractiveness of jobs to applicants sharply decays with distance. Also, workers are discouraged from searching in areas with strong competition from other job-seekers. However, as labor markets overlap, a local stimulus or transport improvements have modest effects on local outcomes, because ripple effects in job applications dilute their impact across a series of overlapping markets.

We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideological segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard indices from the literature on racial segregation. We find that ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms, higher than the segregation of most offline news consumption, and significantly lower than the segregation of face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members. We find no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time.

Customer journey models consider information search behavior only at the pre-purchase stage, yet consumers search for information after purchasing. This paper updates customer journey models by integrating two different streams of research—customer journey and post-decision information search (PDIS)—and examining information search as a valuable consumer response and managerial element of the journey. Findings from a multimethod approach, in-depth interviews and a longitudinal survey, reveal that consumers can engage in PDIS in the pre- and post-consumption phases for different reasons such as to maximize the utility of a purchase, reduce choice uncertainty or regret, and/or satisfy curiosity about a purchase and pre-purchase information search behavior. The findings also indicate that consumers prefer customer-initiated touchpoints for PDIS behavior. The importance of PDIS is reinforced by its positive relationships with customer engagement, word-of-mouth and repurchase intentions. This article provides important managerial insights for dealing with PDIS in the customer journey.