Reducing buyer search costs: implications for electronic marketplaces
Management Science - Special issue: Frontier research on information systems and economics
Content-based book recommending using learning for text categorization
DL '00 Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Digital libraries
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
Recommender systems and their impact on sales diversity
Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
When Online Reviews Meet Hyperdifferentiation: A Study of the Craft Beer Industry
Journal of Management Information Systems
How Information Changes Consumer Behavior and How Consumer Behavior Determines Corporate Strategy
Journal of Management Information Systems
Are Consumers More Likely to Contribute Online Reviews for Hit or Niche Products?
Journal of Management Information Systems
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The Internet makes it easy to offer large assortments of products, tempting managers to chase the "long tail"-that is, the phenomenon in which niche products gain a significant share of demand among all products. Yet few studies empirically examine the existence and drivers of this long tail phenomenon. This study uses a unique data set with 843,922 purchases from 143,939 customers that a monopolistic video-on-demand operator observed over 111 weeks after its launch of the service. The current analysis centers on the effects of increasing assortment sizes and improved search technologies on measures of the long tail, such as per customer demand, the share of products purchased from the assortment, the distribution of demand across products, and the concentration of demand. Increases in assortment sizes and better assortment quality lead to increases in demand per customer and a longer tail. The length of the tail (i.e., share of purchased products) is also driven by new customers and seasonal effects, such as school vacations, whereas the presence of high-quality blockbuster products shortens the tail. Different search technologies can shift demand toward niche products as well as toward blockbuster products.