Some luxury goods manufacturers offer limited editions of their products, whereas some others market multiple product lines. Researchers have found that reference groups shape consumer evaluations of these product categories. Yet little empirical research has examined how reference groups affect...

Online information servers that provide access to diverse databases where users can search for, browse through, and download the information they need have been rapidly increasing in number in the past few years. Online vendors have traditionally charged users for information on the based on the...

We model the situation where the productivity of members of a group, such as a salesforce, is periodically evaluated; those whose performance is sub-par are dismissed and replaced by new members. Individual productivity is modeled as a random variable, the distribution of which is a function of an...

Consumers purchase conspicuous goods to satisfy not only material needs but also social needs such as prestige. In an attempt to meet these social needs, producers of conspicuous goods like cars, perfumes, and watches, highlight the exclusivity of their products. In this paper, we propose a...

Mixed strategies are widely used to model strategic situations in diverse fields such as economics, marketing, political science, and biology. However, some of the implications of asymmetric mixed-strategy solutions are counterintuitive. We develop a stylized model of patent race to examine some...

In this paper, we study the name-your-own-price (NYOP) channel. We examine theoretically and empirically whether asking consumers to place a joint bid for multiple items, rather than bid one item at a time as practiced today, can increase NYOP retailers' profits. Relatedly, we also examine...