Retailers and their suppliers often exchange demand information, which is believed to benefit both firms and consumers. We show how such information exchange can benefit only the upstream supplier at the expense of the downstream retailer and consumers.

The Robinson-Patman Act (RP), an antitrust statute aimed at protecting small businesses, limits price setting in distribution channels. To avoid costly penalties under RP, managers take a variety of precautions when pricing to retailers and wholesalers. But how likely is a court to find a...

In certain product categories, large discount retailers are known to offer shallower assortments than traditional retailers. In this paper, we investigate the competitive incentives for such assortment decisions and the implications for manufacturers’ distribution strategies. Our results show...

This paper investigates the diverging incentives for product quality in a channel with two asymmetric retailers and a common supplier. When retailers differ in terms of service provision and channel power, changes in manufactured quality cause channel conflicts. In particular, our results show...