A Model of Product Design and Information Disclosure Investments

As information availability for products and services is increasing and as consumers engage in more online search prior to purchase decisions, it is becoming more important for firms to know when to invest to reduce consumer uncertainty. We argue that today’s firms should view product design and investments to reduce consumer uncertainty as an integrated process, which is in turn heavily influenced by how much information consumers can obtain independently, for example, by reading product reviews or through third party infomediaries. Using a game-theoretic model, we explain how product quality decisions influence future investments to reduce consumer uncertainty, and demonstrate how firms should take this dependency into account to avoid over-investing in quality. We also show that firms can free ride on the product information already available in the market by third-party infomediaries, and reduce their own disclosure investments. We show that this is especially true for lower quality firms

Collocated interactive outdoor games for children:A systematic literature review

Outdoor play is an important component in the development of children and adolescents. Nevertheless, there is a growing trend towards replacing outdoor play with sedentary indoors activity, related to media consumption and computer games. Researchers in child computer interaction and related fields have been developing games that can be played outside, encouraging physical activity and social interaction. This article reviews this niche but substantial body of work, aiming to provide an overview of these games, the evidence provided regarding the benefits they claim to provide and related methodological issues. The paper takes a critical reflection on the role of technology in outdoor play and suggests areas for future research, including the learning and developmental benefits that these games can provide to children in the long term

Collocated interactive outdoor games for children:A systematic literature review

Outdoor play is an important component in the development of children and adolescents. Nevertheless, there is a growing trend towards replacing outdoor play with sedentary indoors activity, related to media consumption and computer games. Researchers in child computer interaction and related fields have been developing games that can be played outside, encouraging physical activity and social interaction. This article reviews this niche but substantial body of work, aiming to provide an overview of these games, the evidence provided regarding the benefits they claim to provide and related methodological issues. The paper takes a critical reflection on the role of technology in outdoor play and suggests areas for future research, including the learning and developmental benefits that these games can provide to children in the long term

A Model of Product Design and Information Disclosure Investments

New technologies such as product simulators and virtual reality now allow firms to provide realistic product usage experiences and reduce buyer uncertainty about product quality. We argue that today’s firms should view product design and investments to reduce buyer uncertainty as an integrated process, which is in turn influenced by how much information buyers can obtain from third-party infomediaries. We introduce a game-theoretic model of a competitive market where both quality production and quality disclosure are endogenous decisions, affected by information made available by third parties. We show that quality investment under uncertainty never exceeds the level of quality investment under perfect information. Furthermore, we show that information availability by third parties allows firms to free ride, and it especially favors lower quality firms, who can reduce their information disclosure investments more so than higher-quality firms. Finally, we show that the intuitive argument that firms must improve their product quality when overall information availability in the market improves does not always hold. Instead, improved information availability may enable firms to reduce their quality in some situations

Dual Pricing in Electronic Markets

We model the availability of information about product attributes in Internet-based markets, focusing on a phenomenon that we term as information deficit (availability of less than perfect information about product attributes) and its impact on the equilibrium strategies of sellers and buyers in electronic markets. We create a model of a market for a differentiated product and investigate how buyer uncertainty regarding the attributes of the product drives market outcomes. We show that a market for product information can partly correct the inefficiencies that arise from imperfect information and predict that product information will begin to be traded once appropriate micro-transaction payment schemes become available. We formulate a mechanism by which sellers can charge an information rent for fine-grained information about product attributes which we term as a dual pricing mechanism wherein sellers extract an information rent in addition to the price of the product from buyers. We analyze the equilibrium that results and comment on the nature of welfare gains. A key finding of the paper is that allowing sellers to charge dual rents leads to more efficient markets