(0018)

Dozens of companies, even those that had little or nothing to do with the Net, changed their names to include web-oriented designations such as dot.com, dotnet, or Internet. Three researchers from Purdue University, M. Cooper, D. Dimitrov, and P. R. Rau, studied sixty-three companies that changed their names in 1998 and 1999 to include some web orientation. Measuring the price change of the companies from five days prior to a name change (when word of the change began to leak out) to five days after the change was announced, they confirmed a remarkable effect. Companies that changed their names enjoyed an increase in price during that ten-day period that was 125 percent greater than that of their peers. This price increase occurred even when the company's core business had nothing whatsoever to do with the Net.