Our Business Model

Those interested in some of the ideas behind our business model should read the following articles.

Daniel A. Ackerberg (UCLA), Empirically Distinguishing Informative and Prestige Effects of Advertising, RAND Journal of Economics 32:2 (Summer 2001).

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, Wired, October 2004.

Judith Applebaum, Major Media Coverage: What It Does—and Doesn’t Do—for Sales, Publishers Marketing Association Newsletter, November 2004.

Judith Chevalier and Dina Mayzlin (Yale), The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews, Journal of Marketing Research (forthcoming).

David Godes (Harvard) and Dina Mayzlin (Yale), Firm-Created Word-of-Mouth Communication: A Field-Based Quasi-Experiment, Working paper, July 2004.

Dina Mayzlin (Yale), The Influence of Social Networks on the Effectiveness of Promotional Strategies, Working paper, July 2002.

Alan T. Sorensen (Stanford), Bestseller Lists and Product Variety: The Case of Book Sales, Stanford University mimeo, July 2004.

Alan T. Sorensen and Scott J. Rasmussen (Stanford), Is Any Publicity Good Publicity? A Note on the Impact of Book Reviews, Stanford University mimeo, April 2004.

Didier Sornette (UCLA), F. Deschatres, T. Gilbert, and Y.Ageon, Endogenous Versus Exogenous Shocks in Complex Networks: An Empirical Test Using Book Rankings, Physical Review Letters 93 (2004). 

There are two summaries of this study: Phil Schewe and Ben Stein, What Propels a Book to the Top of Online Sales Charts? Physics News Update 709:1 (November 17, 2004), and Stuart Wolpert, UCLA Physicist Applies Physics to Best-Selling Books, UCLA News, December 1, 2004.

Warren St. John, The Talk of the Book World Still Can’t Sell, New York Times, May 20, 2002.