We provide a strategic rationale for growth options under uncertainty and imperfect competition. In a market with strategic competition, investment confers a greater capability to take advantage of future growth opportunities. This strategic advantage leads to the capture of a greater share of...

Technology innovations continue to be one of the greatest drivers of economic growth. Realizing the value of such innovations, however, requires substantial follow-on investments in development and commercialization. The value of these investments is difficult to capture because of uncertain...

We address the value of quick response production practices when selling to a forward-looking consumer population with uncertain, heterogeneous valuations for a product. Consumers have the option of purchasing the product early, before its value has been learned, or delaying the purchase...

The bullwhip effect is the amplification of demand variability along a supply chain: a company bullwhips if it purchases from suppliers more variably than it sells to customers. Such bullwhips (amplifications of demand variability) can lead to mismatches between demand and production and hence...

Demand uncertainty is a key concern of electric utility planners. While the greater use of short lead time technologies provides one possible way to deal with this problem, it is not clear how they are best deployed. The approach taken in this paper is to examine a capacity mix model that...

We consider two-part pricing of a service offered to risk-averse buyers subject to demand uncertainty. Buyers subscribe to the contract before resolution of the uncertainty. Sellers set two-part prices that trade off between insuring buyers against the uncertainty and the ex post deadweight loss...

Web-based group-buying mechanisms are being widely used for both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. We survey currently operational online group-buying markets, and then study this phenomenon using analytical models. We build on the literatures in information...

Firms often have to make their production decisions under conditions of demand uncertainty. This is especially true for product categories such as automobiles and technology goods where the lead time needed for manufacturing forces firms to make production decisions well in advance of the...

An important managerial question is the choice of the pricing rule. We study whether this choice depends on the uncertainty about the number of participating bidders by comparing expected revenues under discriminatory and uniform pricing within an auction model with affiliated values, stochastic...

Flexible capacity has been shown to be very effective to hedge against forecast errors at the investment stage. In a make-to-order environment, this flexibility can also be used to hedge against variability in customer orders in the short term. For that purpose, production levels must be...