Recommended for you: The effect of word of mouth on sales concentration

I examine the role of word of mouth in consumer's product discovery process and its implications for the firm. A monopolist supplies an assortment of horizontally differentiated products and consumers search for a product that matches their taste by sampling products from the assortment or by seeking product recommendations from other consumers. I analyze the underlying consumer interactions that lead to the emergence of word of mouth, examine the optimal pricing and assortment strategy of the firm, and explain the impact of word of mouth on the concentration of sales within the assortment. The model provides a rationale for the long tail phenomenon, explains recent empirical findings in online retail, and is well suited for product categories such as music, film, books, and video game entertainment

Competing against online sharing

Purpose – This paper aims to explore online sharing of copyrighted content over peer‐to‐peer (p2p) file sharing networks and its impact on the music industry, and to assess the viable business models for the industry in the future. Design/methodology/approach – The authors analyze the evolution of the online content market over the years that followed the widespread adoption of p2p. The paper is based on a teaching case, and builds on two related academic papers that provide the theoretical underpinnings for the analysis. Findings – Based on the early developments observed in this marketplace and the aforementioned theoretical work, the paper argues that it is unfeasible to fully eradicate p2p, and so the industry must embrace it by understanding how consumers derive value from the technologies that enable it. Originality/value – The developments analyzed here offer relevant insights for the online content marketplace, allow the scope of strategies available to the music industry to be understood better, and may provide lessons for other industries transitioning to online business models

Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and Cultural Trade Protectionism

We examine the Internet’s impact on the cross-border distribution of cultural goods and assess its implications for cultural policy and cultural diversity. We present a stylized model of a two-country economy where governments are endowed with political preferences over the consumption of domestic content and enact import barriers and subsidies to protect it. We introduce peer-to-peer file sharing as a distinct distribution channel enabled by the Internet that provides access to all media products at a low cost. We report two main findings. First, the Internet renders legacy cultural policy inefficient, and the elimination of import barriers and the reduction of subsidized production can be desirable even when governments exhibit paternalistic preferences favoring the consumption of domestic content. And second, even though the Internet increases cultural diversity within countries, it can also reduce diversity across them

Business model responses to digital piracy

Digital piracy challenges firms by reducing revenues and shifting consumption habits. Recently, some firms have successfully leveraged business models against piracy, but the understanding about this phenomenon still lacks depth and structure. This study examines the characteristics of digital piracy in some of the most affected industries, presents comparative case studies of two iconic firms, Spotify and Netflix, and analyzes their digital business model responses. We generalize their adoption to generic digital content distributors and explain how they contribute to generate and capture value. Theoretical and practical implications for technological innovation, firm diversification, and network competition are also discussed

Measurements in low-speed flow of unsteady pressure distributions on a rectangular wing with an oscillation control surface

The report describes an experiment made jointly by an Anglo-French team to determine unsteady pressure distributions and forces on a low aspect ratio wing with an oscillating control surface. Two series of tests were made in the R.A.E. 5 ft low-speed wind tunnel at frequency parameters between 0.73 and 8.45. The pressure-measuring installations were of two types ; one consisted of a number of individual transducers, and the other employed a series of tubes connected to a single transducer via a pressure switch. The results were compared with calculations based on methods developed at R.A.E. and O.N.E.R.A. The tests showed that the measuring systems provided results which were in themselves consistent; there were, however, disparities between upper and lower surface oscillatory pressure distributions which made comparisons between theory and experiment difficult

On staying grounded and avoiding Quixotic dead ends

The 15 articles in this special issue on The Representation of Concepts illustrate the rich variety of theoretical positions and supporting research that characterize the area. Although much agreement exists among contributors, much disagreement exists as well, especially about the roles of grounding and abstraction in conceptual processing. I first review theoretical approaches raised in these articles that I believe are Quixotic dead ends, namely, approaches that are principled and inspired but likely to fail. In the process, I review various theories of amodal symbols, their distortions of grounded theories, and fallacies in the evidence used to support them. Incorporating further contributions across articles, I then sketch a theoretical approach that I believe is likely to be successful, which includes grounding, abstraction, flexibility, explaining classic conceptual phenomena, and making contact with real-world situations. This account further proposes that (1) a key element of grounding is neural reuse, (2) abstraction takes the forms of multimodal compression, distilled abstraction, and distributed linguistic representation (but not amodal symbols), and (3) flexible context-dependent representations are a hallmark of conceptual processing

The effect of steady tailplane lift on the oscillatory behaviour of a T-tail flutter model at high subsonic speeds

The oscillatory behaviour of a T-tail has been investigated at high subsonic Mach numbers on an aeroelastic model having tailplane settings of zero and three degrees. There is broadly satisfactory agreement between calculated and measured values of modal frequency and damping. The comparison has been based mainly on the flutter margin criterion of Zimmerman and Weissenburger, since the more conventional comparisons are inconclusive

Combining e-graphs with abstract interpretation

E-graphs are a data structure that compactly represents equivalent expressions. They are constructed via the repeated application of rewrite rules. Often in practical applications, conditional rewrite rules are crucial, but their application requires the detection -- at the time the e-graph is being built -- that a condition is valid in the domain of application. Detecting condition validity amounts to proving a property of the program. Abstract interpretation is a general method to learn such properties, traditionally used in static analysis tools. We demonstrate that abstract interpretation and e-graph analysis naturally reinforce each other through a tight integration because (i) the e-graph clustering of equivalent expressions induces natural precision refinement of abstractions and (ii) precise abstractions allow the application of deeper rewrite rules (and hence potentially even greater precision). We develop the theory behind this intuition and present an exemplar interval arithmetic implementation, which we apply to the FPBench suite