One of the main reasons for poor state of education in developing countries is an inability to meet the heterogeneous learning needs of a large student population with constrained educational resources. We provide experimental evidence that computer-generated personalized homework can...

Customers often evaluate products at brick-and-mortar stores to identify their “best fit” product but buy it for a lower price at a competing online retailer. This free-riding behavior by customers is referred to as “showrooming” and we show that this is detrimental to the profits of the...

Public 'Beta' launches have become a preferred route of entry into themarkets for new software products and web site based services. Whilebeta testing of novel products is nothing new, typically such tests weredone by experts within firm boundaries. What makes public beta testingso attractive to...

The introduction of product upgrades in a competitive environment is commonly observed in the software industry. When introducing a new product, a software vendor may employ behavior-based price discrimination (BBPD) by offering a discount over its market price to entice existing customers of...

Access to a platform's services often requires consumers to use a complementary hardware product or service, e.g., Internet service is needed to access the YouTube platform. Typically, such access products are provided by third-party firms. More recently, however, some major platforms like...

The existence of reference price effects in consumer decision making is well documented in prior research, but few studies focus on its implications for firms' strategic behavior. Using a competitive model, we address this gap by examining how firms' product positioning and pricing strategies in...

The rapid pace of technological innovation necessitates Information Technology (IT) services firms to continually invest in replenishing the skills of their key asset base, the human capital. We examine whether human capital investments directed towards employee training are effective in...

The ongoing digitization of multiple industries has drastically reduced the half-life of skills and capabilities acquired by knowledge workers through formal education. Thus, firms are forced to make significant ongoing investments in training their employees to remain competitive. Existing...

In this paper, we model competition between two software product vendors, an incumbent and entrant, with specific focus on the role of switching costs. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that under certain conditions the switching costs imposed by the incumbent's product could actually...