This dissertation explores how consumers learn from repeated experiences with a product offering. It develops a new Bayesian consumer learning model, the unstable learning model. This model expands on existing models that explore learning when quality is stable, by considering when quality is...

This dissertation focuses on managerial decision making, and specifically explores conditions wherein managers may increase their propensity to escalate commitment towards a failing project. Escalation researchers (e.g. Schmidt and Calantone, 2002) have listed four classes of factors that may...

This paper studies the marketing problem of a firm trying to obtain an attractive mix of customers by making customized offers. The firm values the average features of the acquired set of customers, makes decisions with uncertainty about whether and which customers will accept offers, is risk...

In many industries firms have to make quantity decisions before knowing the exact state of demand. In such cases, channel members have to decide which firm will own the units until demand uncertainty is resolved. The decision about who should retain ownership depends on the balance of benefit...

Search advertising refers to the practice where advertisers place their text-based advertisement on the search engine's result page along with the organic search results. With its growing importance, search advertising has seen a recent surge in academic interest. However, the literature has...

Firms collaborate to develop and deliver new products. These collaborations vary in terms of the similarity of the competencies that partnering firms bring to the alliance. In same-function alliances, partnering firms have similar competencies, whereas in cross-function alliances, partners have...

Organizational researchers have long considered innovation a critical activity. While insightful regarding the nature of the innovation process and the rewards and risk associated with innovation, prior work has neglected the perspective that innovations function within a firm's wider product...

Obesity is now a global problem. Within the U.S., the rise in obesity has been largely driven by the increase in caloric consumption. By specifically observing the practices in the fast food industry, this dissertation examines two factors, portion sizes and bundling, to answer the question,...

Behavioral decision researchers have documented a number of anomalies that seem to run counter to established theories of consumer behavior from microeconomics that are often at the core of analytical models in marketing. A natural question therefore is how equilibrium behavior and strategies...

Several influential streams of research in marketing, psychology, and economics conclude that, holding constant the offer a seller makes to a buyer, the buyer will be repelled by learning that some other group of buyers is getting a better price for the same benefits or receiving more benefits...