In this paper, we investigate a seller's voluntary disclosure strategy when serving two groups of consumers who arrive sequentially and are reference dependent with respect to product quality. Consumers may be naive or sophisticated, depending on whether they can make rational inferences from...

This paper investigates a retailer's incentive of sharing the private demand information with a supplier who may encroach the retail channel by exerting a fixed entry cost. Although the conventional wisdom suggests that a retailer should withhold her private demand observation to keep the...

Problem definition: Outsourcing is a common operations strategy nowadays, but it may lead to an unintended consequence of supplier copycatting. When outsourcing, there is some subtle information that the manufacturer knows but is optional for the supplier to carry out the production task, such...

In this paper, we investigate the interplay between the returns policy, the pricing strategy, and the quality risk. We define quality risk as the possibility of product misfit, defect, or unconformity with the consumers' perception. These notions of quality risks differ in return policy...

We study an aggregated marketplace where potential buyers arrive and submit requests-for-quotes (RFQs). There are n independent suppliers modelled as M=GI=1 queues that compete for these requests. Each supplier submits a bid that comprises of a fixed price and a dynamic target leadtime, and the...

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of online auctions. Currently, some online auctions, such as eBay, introduce a proxy bidding policy, under which bidders submit their maximum bids and delegate to a proxy agent to automatically outbid other competitors for the top bidder, whereas...

The majority of academic papers on the Internet auction design does not distinguish between the auctioneer and the object owner, whereas nowadays leading Internet auction websites operate primarily as mediators that provide the platforms with no physical possessions of the auction objects. The...

Motivated by the recent practice, we study the advance selling strategy without showing the price (which may be coined as "probabilistic pricing"). We postulate that customers have boundedly rational expectations via anecdotal reasoning to anticipate the firm's pricing strategy. This bounded...

As a common practice, various firms initially make information and access to their products/services scarce within a social network; identifying influential players that facilitate information dissemination emerges as a pivotal step for their success. In this paper, we tackle this problem using...

We study an aggregated marketplace where potential buyers arrive and submit requests-for-quotes (RFQs). There are n independent suppliers modeled as M/GI/1 queues that compete for these requests. Each supplier submits a bid that comprises of a fixed price and a dynamic target leadtime, and the...