Reducing buyer search costs: implications for electronic marketplaces
Management Science - Special issue: Frontier research on information systems and economics
Effective personalization based on association rule discovery from web usage data
Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Web information and data management
Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional Retailers
Management Science
Aspectos da interação humano-computador na Web social
Proceedings of the VIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems
An enhanced model framework of personalized material flow services
Information Technology and Management
Long-tail recommendation based on reflective indexing
AI'11 Proceedings of the 24th international conference on Advances in Artificial Intelligence
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Optimal Search for Product Information
Management Science
Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
A new collaborative filtering approach for increasing the aggregate diversity of recommender systems
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Who likes it more?: mining worth-recommending items from long tails by modeling relative preference
Proceedings of the 7th ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
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Many markets have historically been dominated by a small number of best-selling products. The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes this common pattern of sales concentration. However, information technology in general and Internet markets in particular have the potential to substantially increase the collective share of niche products, thereby creating a longer tail in the distribution of sales. This paper investigates the Internet's “long tail” phenomenon. By analyzing data collected from a multichannel retailer, it provides empirical evidence that the Internet channel exhibits a significantly less concentrated sales distribution when compared with traditional channels. Previous explanations for this result have focused on differences in product availability between channels. However, we demonstrate that the result survives even when the Internet and traditional channels share exactly the same product availability and prices. Instead, we find that consumers' usage of Internet search and discovery tools, such as recommendation engines, are associated with an increase the share of niche products. We conclude that the Internet's long tail is not solely due to the increase in product selection but may also partly reflect lower search costs on the Internet. If the relationships we uncover persist, the underlying trends in technology portend an ongoing shift in the distribution of product sales. This paper was accepted by Ramayya Krishnan, information systems.