We consider the compensation design problem of a firm that hires a salesperson to exert effort to increase demand. We assume both demand and supply to be uncertain, with sales being the smaller of demand and supply, and assume that if demand exceeds supply then unmet demand is unobservable...

Several researchers have proposed models of buyer behavior in noncontractual settings that assume that customers are "alive" for some period of time and then become permanently inactive. The best-known such model is the Pareto/NBD, which assumes that customer attrition (dropout or "death") can...

While millions of products are sold on its retail platform, Amazon.com itself stocks and sells only a very small fraction of them. Most of these products are sold by third-party sellers who pay Amazon a fee for each unit sold. Empirical evidence clearly suggests that Amazon tends to sell...

We study the bidding strategies of vertically differentiated firms that bid for sponsored search advertisement positions for a keyword at a search engine. We explicitly model how consumers navigate and click on sponsored links based on their knowledge and beliefs about firm qualities. Our model...

Firms in several markets attract consumers by offering discounts in other unrelated markets. This promotion strategy, which we call "cross-market discounts," has been successfully adopted in the last few years by many grocery retailers in partnership with gasoline retailers across North America,...

In mature markets with competing firms, a common role for advertising is to shift consumer preferences towards the advertiser in a tug-of-war, with no effect on category demand. In this paper, we analyze the effect of such “combative” advertising on market power. We show that, depending on...

Many established industries, such as the online service industry, the telecommunication industry, or the fitness club industry, are access service industries. When using services in these industries, consumers pay for the privilege of accessing the firm's facilities but do not acquire any right...

In this note, we explore channel interactions in an information-intensive environment where the retailer can implement personalized pricing and the manufacturer can leverage both personalized pricing and entry into a direct distribution channel. We study whether a retailer can benefit from...

Critics have long faulted the wide-spread practice of trade promotions as wasteful. It has been estimated that this practice adds up to $100 billion worth of inventory to the distribution system. Yet, the practice continues. In this paper, we propose a price discrimination model of trade...

Retailers have long recognized that some categories are more important than others in consumers' store choice decisions. The overall profitability of a store requires careful category-level merchandising decisions to draw the most desirable consumers into the store. However, the traditional...