Introducing new products is both risky and critical to a company's success. To help mitigate these risks, the use of line extension strategies has become widespread, with some researchers reporting that 95% of new product introductions are extensions of current brands. Support for the use of...

In public procurement a temporal separation of award and actual contracting can frequently be observed. In this paper we give an explanation for this institutional setting. For incomplete procurement contracts we show that such a separation may increase efficiency. We show that efficiency can be...

Our objective is to understand how a firm’s product development capability (PDC) affects the launch strategy for a durable product that is sequentially improved over time in a market where consumers have heterogeneous valuations for quality. We show that the launch strategy of firms is...

We propose that category membership can operate as a collective market signal for quality when low-quality producers face higher costs of gaining membership. The strength of membership as a collective signal increases with the distinctiveness, or contrast, of the category. Our empirical study...