The Quest for Content: How User-Generated Links Can Facilitate Online Exploration

Vol. XLIX (August 2012), 452–468 *Jacob Goldenberg is Professor of Marketing, School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Visiting Professor of Marketing, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University (e-mail: [email protected]). Gal Oestreicher-Singer is Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration, Tel Aviv University (e-mail: [email protected]). Shachar Reichman is a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Center for Digital Business, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (e-mail: [email protected]). The authors thank Erik Brynjolfsson, Nicholas Economides, Barak Libai, Dina Mayzlin, and Eitan Muller for many helpful discussions and participants at the Marketing Science Conference, the Emergence and Impact of User-Generated Content Conference, the International Conference on Information Systems conferences, and the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics for valuable comments and suggestions. The authors also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Marketing Science Institute and the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, and the Next Generation Video (NeGeV) Consortium (www.negev-initiative. org). Sunil Gupta served as associate editor for this article. JACOB GOLDENBERG, GAL OESTREICHER-SINGER, and SHACHAR REICHMAN*