By lowering the costs of gathering and sharing information and offering new ways to learn about products before purchase, the Internet reduces traditional distinctions between search and experience goods. At the same time, differences in the type of information sought for search and experience goods can precipitate differences in the process through which consumers gather information and make decisions online. A preliminary experiment shows that though there are significant differences in consumers' perceived ability to evaluate product quality before purchase between search and experience goods in traditional retail environments, these differences are blurred in online environments. An analysis of the online behavior of a representative sample of U.S. consumers shows that consumers spend similar amounts of time online gathering information for both search and experience goods, but there are important differences in the browsing and purchase behavior of consumers for these two types of goods. In particular, experience goods involve greater depth (time per page) and lower breadth (total number of pages) of search than search goods. In addition, free riding (purchasing from a retailer other than the primary source of product information) is less frequent for experience than for search goods. Finally, the presence of product reviews from other consumers and multimedia that enable consumers to interact with products before purchase has a greater effect on consumer search and purchase behavior for experience than for search goods. Building on this idea, Nelson (1970Nelson ( , 1974 classifies products into search and experience goods according to consumers' ability to obtain product quality information before purchase. Nelson argues that consumers conduct minimal prepurchase information search for experience goods but perform extensive search for search goods. However, several authors (e.g., Alba et al. 1997;Klein 1998;Peterson, Balasubramanian, and Bronnenberg 1997) have suggested that because the Internet enables consumers to learn from the experiences of others and to gather product information that is often difficult to obtain in offline settings (Klein 1998;Lynch and Ariely 2000), it makes all attributes searchable and erases differences between search and experience goods.An alternative perspective on information search is provided by research on how consumers acquire and process information to make decisions (Bettman et al. 1993;Ha and Hoch 1989;Lurie 2004;Lynch and Ariely 2000;Shugan 1980). This research shows that different types of information are associated with different cognitive processes that affect the way information is acquired, the amount of information acquired, and the time spent processing each piece of information (Johnson, Bellman, and Lohse 2003;Johnson and Payne 1985;Payne, Bettman, and Johnson 1988). If consumers seek different information for search and experience goods, this perspective implies that online search and purchase behavior may be different for these two types of goods.This art...

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We examine whether ownership of intellectual property rights (IPR) or downstream capabilities is effective in encouraging entry into markets complementary to a proprietary platform by preventing the platform owner from expropriating rents from start-ups. We study this question in the context of the software industry, an environment where evidence of the efficacy of IPR as a mechanism to appropriate the returns from innovation has been mixed. Entry, in our context, is measured by an independent software vendor's (ISV's) decision to become certified by a platform owner and produce applications compatible with the platform. We find that ISVs with a greater stock of formal IPR (such as patents and copyrights), and those with stronger downstream capabilities (as measured by trademarks and consulting services) are more likely to join the platform, suggesting that these mechanisms are effective in protecting ISVs from the threat of expropriation. We also find that the effects of IPR on the likelihood of partnership are greater when an ISV has weak downstream capabilities or when the threat of imitation is greater, such as when the markets served by the ISV are growing quickly. This paper was accepted by Gérard P. Cachon, information systems.

How should digital platforms engage with and invest in their online communities to shape innovation and knowledge contributions from members in their platform ecosystems? This is an important question because user contributions are important drivers of technological progress and business value. We examine the effect of platform sponsors' investments in online communities on user knowledge contributions, using fine-grained longitudinal data from a leading enterprise software vendor's community network. We focus on the sponsor practice of knowledge seeding, in which its employees provide free technical support by answering questions posted in discussion forums. We define user knowledge contribution as peer-evaluated, quality-weighted solutions that community members provide to help resolve the questions their peers raise. We show that the platform sponsor's investments in knowledge seeding have a positive, significant association with user knowledge contribution. We also find temporal and geographical variations in returns on the sponsor's knowledge investments. Specifically, returns (i.e., amount of user contribution that is stimulated) decrease with the age of the community, consistent with the observation that the most active contributors are lead users who tend to join the community early. In addition, returns vary across different countries, such that greater returns are realized when the investment is made in countries with higher levels of information technology (IT) infrastructure, partly because country-level IT infrastructure may be associated with greater absorptive capacity of these countries. We discuss the implications for research and practice.

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