United States firms collectively spend over $6.5 billion annually on coupon promotions and are becoming increasingly concerned with their profitability. FSI (free-standing-insert) data show that coupon duration varies across brands. In this paper, we show how coupon duration can affect coupon...

Designing distribution systems requires two decisions, one strategic (i.e., the number of levels between the producer and the customer) and the other tactical (i.e., channel management policies such as trade discounts and rebates). While the modeling literature focuses on one or the other,...

We incorporate the concept of fairness in a conventional dyadic channel to investigate how fairness may affect channel coordination. We show that when channel members are concerned about fairness, the manufacturer can use a simple wholesale price above her marginal cost to coordinate this...

Existing literature, based on signaling theory, suggests that money-back guarantees (MBGs) will be utilized by high-quality firms, where high quality is defined as a low likelihood of product return. However, in today's world, MBGs are ubiquitous among major retailers, even when the likelihood...

Managers of retail chains who seek to add new stores or close existing ones need to know the net impact of a store's opening/closure on the overall chain performance. This requires inferring the extent to which each store generates incremental sales as opposed to competing with other stores...

The practice of offering discounts to prospective customers represents a rudimentary form of using transaction history measures to customize the marketing mix. Furthermore, the proliferation of powerful customer relationship management (CRM) systems is providing the data and the communications...

Every marketer's dream is to create a "hot product" that customers would absolutely want to have, thus generating considerable profit to the marketer. According to one school of thought, marketers should make products hard to get in order to create really hot products. In this paper, using a...

A general model describing individual consuming unit response to an advertising stimulus is developed. The measure of behavior utilized is consumption. In the model, the various effects of advertising on behavior are decomposed. These are price-advertising interactions, transitory or short-run...

Consumer behavior researchers are getting more interested in the experiential aspect of consumption, which focuses on the fun and enjoyment that consumers derive from hedonic experiences. We build upon the experiential view of consumer behavior, and present an innovative modeling approach to...

A methodology for forecasting the sales of an ethical drug as a function of marketing effort before any sales data are available and for updating the forecast with a few periods of sales data is presented. Physicians' perceptions of the drug on a number of attributes, e.g. effectiveness, range...