In recent years, the practitioner literature in operations management has seen a dramatic surge in articles on quality management. It reflects the increased emphasis on quality by U.S. firms, which has been attributed largely to increased competition faced by them. The question of how quality is...

A service plan is a type of optional warranty beyond manufacturers' base warranties that retailers offer to consumers. In this paper, we examine how a service plan affects the role played by a manufacturer's base warranty. Analysis shows that when consumers can assess product quality (i.e., the...

Faced with the decision of whether or not to adopt a new technology whose economic value cannot be gauged with certainty, the manager of the firm may elect to decrease the uncertainty by sequentially gathering information (at a unit cost of c 0), updating his prior beliefs in a Bayesian manner....

Bundling, which is the practice of selling two or more products or services in a package, is a pervasive marketing practice and is often used as a strategic competitive tool. However, there has not been enough consideration of competitive bundling situations in which exit of a competitor is not...

We present an analytical framework for understanding what makes a product category more conducive for store brand introduction. We also investigate market characteristics that help explain differences in store brand market share across product categories. Our findings suggest that the...

We analyze the competitive capacity investment timing decisions of both established firms and start-ups entering new markets, which have a high degree of demand uncertainty. Firms may invest in capacity early (when uncertainty is high) or late (when uncertainty has been resolved), possibly at...

The value of new information depends on how accurate the information is, but it may also depend on the characteristics of the firm and the nature of the industry it operates in. We develop a game-theoretic model to understand how firm and industry characteristics moderate the effect of market...