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,...

Promotional tools such as rebates and coupons are usually seen as different ways of price discriminating among consumers. We focus on a different property of rebates: their ability to price discriminate within a consumer among her postpurchase states. Unlike price discrimination between...

We investigate in this paper whether dynamic targeted pricing based on consumer purchase history could benefit a practicing firm even when consumers are "strategic" in that they actively seek to avail themselves of a low price in the future. Such strategic behavior on the part of consumers has...

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...