We study the fuel procurement problem for electrical utilities under uncertain demand and market price. Long-term contractual supply commitments are made at a set price with fuel suppliers at the beginning of each year. Each month the procurement planner can use fuel from these contracts or...

This paper studies the value to a supplier of obtaining better information about a buyer's cost structure, and of being able to offer more general contracts. We use the bilateral monopoly setting to analyze six scenarios: three increasingly general contracts (wholesale-pricing schemes, two-part...

Marketers often stress the importance of treating customers as partners. A fundamental premise of this perspective is that all parties can be weakly better off if they work together to increase joint surplus and reach Pareto-efficient agreements. For marketing managers, this implies organizing...

It is common for a retailer to sell products from competing manufacturers. How then should the firms manage their contract negotiations? The supply chain coordination literature focuses either on a single manufacturer selling to a single retailer or one manufacturer selling to many (possibly...

Many research universities engage in efforts to license inventions developed by university-affiliated inventors. However, no systematic explanation of the conditions under which university inventions will be licensed or commercialized has been provided. Drawing on transaction cost economics, I...

While every firm in a supply chain bears supply risk (the cost of insufficient supply), some firms may, even with wholesale price contracts, completely avoid inventory risk (the cost of unsold inventory). With a push contract there is a single wholesale price and the retailer, by ordering his...