This paper studies the relationship between three key elements of the marketing mix, namely, price, product, and promotion, in a model where a seller employs informative advertising to launch a new product. We propose a fairly general advertising technology for the study of three promotional...

This paper shows how a firm can use non-targeted advertising to exploit consumers' desire for social status. A monopolist sells multiple varieties of a good to consumers who each care about what others believe about his wealth. Advertising allows consumers both to buy different varieties and to...

The search literature assumes that consumers know which firms sell products they are looking for, but are unaware of the particular variety and the prices at which each firm sells. In this paper, we consider the situation where consumers are uncertain whether a firm carries the product at all by...

We model the idea that when consumers search for products, they first visit the firm whose advertising is more salient. The gains a firm derives from being visited early increase in search costs, so equilibrium advertising increases as search costs rise. This may result in lower firm profits...

We consider a duopoly in a homogenous goods market where part of the consumers are ex ante uninformed about prices. Information can come through two different channels: advertising and sequential consumer search. We arrive at the following results. First, there is no monotone relationship...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the 'SIAM Journal on Optimization', 2007, 18, 290-308. <P> In this paper we present two general results on the existence of a discrete zero point of a function from the n-dimensional integer lattice Zn to the n-dimensional Euclidean space Rn. Under...</p>

We explore the feasibility of a funded pension system with intergenerational risk sharing when participation in the system is voluntary. Typically, the willingness of the young to participate depends on their belief about the future young's willingness to do so. We characterise equilibria with...

We apply utility indifference pricing to solve a contingent claim problem, valuing a connected pair of gas fields where the underlying process is not standard Geometric Brownian motion and the assumption of complete markets is not fulfilled. First, empirical data are often characterized by...

In a recent paper, Fisher et al. (2001) present a method tomitigate end-effects in lot sizing by including a valuation term for end-of-horizon inventory in the objective function of the short-horizon model. Computational tests show that the proposed method outperforms the Wagner-Whitin algorithm...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in 'Mathematical Programming', ser. A, 2006, 108, 127-134. <P>