Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors 2020/21: No. 47

Best Buy is a consumer electronics retailer with nearly 2,000 stores worldwide. In 2012, the rising popularity of price-matching apps for mobile phones made price differences between retailers transparent, online and offline. Shoppers' desire to test electronics first-hand before purchase drove them to use Best Buy stores as 'showrooms' to see new products and then search for better deals on their smartphones. This case examines how Best Buy contends with this and asks whether they can survive by permanently price-matching their online-only competitors, primarily Amazon, despite having higher costs.

Among the challenges facing Airbnb, Etsy, and Uber were maintaining the fast pace of customer acquisition, reducing customer retention problems, and avoiding regulatory issues. How did these platforms balance their fast growth and massive size with so little time to adapt to ever mounting challenges? How did they adapt and change their customer acquisition tactics to grow from one million to many millions of customers so quickly? This is the third and final instalment of the Airbnb, Etsy, Uber trilogy.

In 2013, TripAdvisor was the most visited online travel site in the world. It hosted a massive repository of information on hotels and travel services, and provided millions of reviews written by consumers. Consumers were becoming increasingly motivated to read and write reviews on TripAdvisor, largely as a means of informing other consumers about their personal experiences, but also to praise or complain to hotels about their experiences. In response, hotels were investing more time and marketing budget on managing the quantity, quality and location of online reviews, with particular attention paid to TripAdvisor.