About

Wilfred Amaldoss is the Thomas A. Finch Jr. Endowed Professor of Marketing at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing in 1998 from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. His academic career includes teaching at the Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University before his current appointment. His research focuses on strategic behavior in the context of pricing and advertising. He has contributed to understanding content provision on user-generated content platforms, sustainable consumption strategies, self-preferencing in e-commerce marketplaces, collaboration and competition among news publishers, and pricing strategies for vice goods and media platforms. Amaldoss has served as an associate editor for Management Science and has been recognized with multiple awards for his editorial contributions, including the Frank M. Bass Award and the John D. C. Little Award. He has also received numerous teaching awards at Duke, highlighting his excellence in instruction across various programs.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Marketing
• Advertising
• Business
• Microeconomics
• Industrial organization
• Economics

Selected publications

• Content Provision on UGC Platforms

  Management Science · 2025-06-18 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Consumers visiting platforms that host user-generated content (UGC) not only consume content but also generate content by investing time and effort. This paper seeks to examine a UGC platform’s content provision strategy: how a UGC platform can motivate consumers to generate UGC and how it can manage the balance between UGC and the platform’s own content. As UGC and the platform’s own content perform the same function, one may be inclined to think that the two types of content are substitutes. Our analysis shows that they could function as strategic complements. This is because increasing the platform’s own content provision raises the quality of content on the platform, motivates more consumers to join the platform, and increases the total UGC provision on the platform. The public good characteristics of UGC could prompt us to think that UGC provision on the platform will be less than the socially optimal level. Our analysis identifies conditions when the total provision of UGC can be more than the social optimum. One may wonder whether it is profitable for a UGC platform to completely dispense with its own content. We find that it is always profitable for the UGC platform to offer some of its own content. This is because when consumers spend more time consuming the content, the platform can monetize their attention and earn higher ad revenue. Additionally, we find that an increase in ad space on the platform may motivate greater provision of UGC. Finally, we extend the model in several different directions and find that our results are robust. This paper was accepted by Raphael Thomadsen, marketing. Funding: W. Shin gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Brian R. Gamache Endowed Professorship at the University of Florida. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01066 .

  PublisherDOI

• How Should Publishers Manage Gift Articles and Social Interactions?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How can Search Engines use Information Aggregation Units to Compete with and Profit from Sellers?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sustainable Consumption: A Strategic Analysis

  Marketing Science · 2025-02-13 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper theoretically investigates optimal firm response in the market for sustainable products, finding counterintuitive insights regarding prices, profits, and consumer surplus.

  PublisherDOI

• Rejoinder: Can a Prototypical Product Be Priced Lower Than a Nonprototypical Product?

  Marketing Science · 2024-12-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We present the conditions under which a prototypical product can be priced lower than a nonprototypical product when consumer valuations are moderately high.

  PublisherDOI

• Self-Preferencing in E-Commerce Marketplaces: The Role of Sponsored Advertising and Private Labels

  Marketing Science · 2024 · 41 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Advertising
  • Business

  We study when and why a platform may seek to give preference to its private label in sponsored advertising.

  PublisherDOI

• CONTENT PROVISION ON UGC PLATFORMS

  Global Fashion Management Conference · 2023-07-17

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Pricing Strategy of Competing Media Platforms

  Marketing Science · 2023 · 48 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Microeconomics
  • Business
  • Economics

  Competing media platforms’ equilibrium pricing strategies in the presence of cross-side externalities between consumers and advertisers and their endogenous homing decisions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sustainable Consumption: A Strategic Analysis

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How Can Publishers Collaborate and Compete with News Aggregators?

  Journal of Marketing Research · 2023-01-13 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Publishers face an existential threat from a variety of news aggregators, such as free aggregators (e.g., Google News, Yahoo News), micropayment-facilitating aggregators (e.g., Blendle), and subscription-charging aggregators (e.g., Apple News+). The authors seek to theoretically examine whether publishers can collaborate and compete with the different types of news aggregators and, if so, what pricing and content-sharing strategies publishers should pursue. In the absence of a news aggregator, publishers sell their content as a composite publication; this intensifies interpublisher price competition and hurts publishers’ profits. A free aggregator, however, could help unbundle the articles of a publisher. Moreover, if publishers share articles on the same topic with a free aggregator, they can completely eliminate interpublisher competition and replace it with competition between the aggregator and the publishers, but they only partially eliminate interpublisher competition if they share articles on different topics with it. Yet, the free aggregator needs to bring sufficient additional traffic to the publishers to motivate them to share content and collaborate with it. Conversely, publishers will be willing to collaborate with a micropayment-facilitating aggregator even if it does not bring additional traffic to the publishers. This is because a micropayment-facilitating aggregator helps publishers unbundle their content and price discriminate. Lastly, publishers can be motivated to collaborate even with a subscription-charging aggregator that is powerful enough to dictate the terms of the revenue-sharing arrangement with the publishers. This is because the subscription-charging aggregator improves its profits without hurting the publishers’ surplus.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Amnon Rapoport

  University of California, Riverside

  20 shared

• Sanjay Jain

  The University of Texas at Dallas

  12 shared

• Chuan He

  University of California, Davis

  8 shared

• Teck‐Hua Ho

  Nanyang Technological University

  6 shared

• Woochoel Shin

  University of Florida

  6 shared

• Noah Lim

  4 shared

• Robert J. Meyer

  University of Pennsylvania

  4 shared

• Preyas S. Desai

  Duke University

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Frank M. Bass Award from the INFORMS College of Marketing (2…
• John D. C. Little Award for the best marketing paper publish…
• Distinguished Service Award from Management Science (2009, 2…
• Jay Ross Young Faculty Scholar (2011)
• Finalist for the Long-Term Impact Award for a paper publishe…