This thesis examines the strategic drivers and processes governing the development of products and/or technologies by multiple economic entities. The thesis adopts an operational approach in addressing the question and examines the how of joint product development. For this purpose, the...

In any pool of ideas, it is often the case that a small fraction of top ideas have significantly higher quality, both in absolute terms and relative to other ideas in the pool. This study formulates a model of idea pools, and examines the impact of the “structure” of idea pools on the extent...

In various industries end-product manufacturers acquire core subsystems from upstream technology provider firms, and focus primarily on efficient end-product integration.We examine the strategic interactions between a technology firm that introduces a new subsystem, and the respective...

Crowdsourcing platforms typically take a passive approach and let solvers self-select which (if any) of the concurrently running contests they wish to participate into. Thus, firms which set prizes and organize contests on these platforms are competing among themselves (for solver participation...

Organizations increasingly seek solutions to their open-ended design problems by employing a contest approach in which search over a solution space is delegated to outside agents. We study this new class of problems, which are costly to specify, pose credibility issues for the focal firm, and...

Firms in a variety of industries offer addon products to consumers who have previously purchased a base-product. We posit that consumers, in making their decision whether to purchase an addon that complements the base-product, find a greater need for the value offered by the addon when the...

In many industries, consumers who purchase services pay a fixed upfront fee for access, and then consume that service over a period of time. In this paper, we examine the implications of this temporal separation of purchase and consumption on a user's consumption choices, and on the firm's...

Innovation contests have been studied primarily as mechanisms to obtain extreme valued solutions. In the current work, we propose that this conceptualization of innovation contests needs to be expanded to also consider the long-term benefits from the knowledge/capabilities generated by the...

The classical price competition model (named after Bertrand), prescribes that in equilibrium prices are equal to marginal costs. Moreover, prices do not depend on the number of competitors. Since this outcome is not in line with real-life observations, it is known as the Bertrand Paradox. Many...

We present a field study of social learning. The setting is a pair of adjacent fast food restaurants serving very similar cuisine whose main clientele are the students at a nearby major university. We observed whether an uninformed customer's choice of restaurant depends on the relative queue...