Essays on product design and online word-of-mouth

This dissertation consists of three essays on the topics of product design and online Word-of-mouth (WOM). The first essay considers two robustness approaches to design a product line under great uncertainty. An efficient frontier of robust designs is constructed, and a simple metric is proposed to finalize designs on the frontier. Moving from analytical modeling to real-world data, the second essay empirically studies the differential impact of online reviews that express different levels of expertise on consumer demand for craft beers. The key finding is that reviews from non-experts are more influential than those from experts. Finally, the third essay establishes the relationship between co-mentions with popular products in discussion forums and demand for niche products in the context of craft beers. The results suggest that consumer demand is positively associated with being co-mentioned with top-selling products, and the effect is significant for products in the tail of sales distribution.