Researchers and business thought leaders have emphasized that, towards maximizing the lifetime value of customers, firms must manage customer relationships for the long term. In contrast to this recommendation, we demonstrate that firm profits in competitive environments are maximized when...

The extensive adoption of uniform pricing for branded variants is a puzzling phenomenon, considering that firms may improve profitability through price discrimination. In the paper, we incorporate consumers' concerns of peer-induced price fairness into a model of price competition and show that...

In the first part of the dissertation, we incorporate the concept of distributive fairness into the conventional dyadic channel to study how fairness may affect the interactions between the manufacturer and the retailer. Traditional wisdom has shown that only nonlinear pricing schemes can...

S-shaped incentive schemes and pay caps are fairly common in practice. This paper demonstrates the optimality of s-shaped incentive schemes and pay caps by incorporating salespeople's aversion to pay inequity into the standard agency model. Our analysis shows that salespeople's desire for pay...

Critics have long faulted the wide-spread practice of trade promotions as wasteful. It has been estimated that this practice adds up to $100 billion worth of inventory to the distribution system. Yet the practice continues. In this paper, we propose a price-discrimination model of trade...

In this paper, we incorporate the concept of fairness in a conventional dyadic channel to investigate how fairness may affect channel coordination. We show that when channel members are concerned about fairness, the manufacturer can use a simple wholesale price above its marginal cost to...