Under the store-within-a-store arrangement, retailers essentially rent out their retail space to manufacturers and give them complete autonomy over retail decisions like pricing and in-store service. This intriguing retailing format, also known as vendor shops, boutiques or manufacturer-managed...

As sponsored search becomes increasingly important as an advertising medium for firms, search engines are exploring more advanced bidding and ranking mechanisms to increase their revenue from auctions for sponsored search advertising. For instance, Google, Yahoo! and Bing are experimenting with...

We study multi-period salesforce incentive contracting when sales agents can dynamically choose between a safe action and a bold or risky action, where the bold action has higher expected sales but also higher polarization in sales and higher effort cost. Using a two-period model with ex-ante...

In this paper, we investigate how retailer competition and asymmetry affect store brand strategy when some of the consumers are one-stop shoppers. We find that when the intensity of competition between retailers is low, store brands can be used to shield consumers loyal to the national brand...

We address a critical question that many firms are facing in this era of "big data'': Can customer data be stored and analyzed in an easy-to-manage and scalable manner without significantly compromising the inferences that can be made about the customers' transaction activity? We address this...

Advertising on e-commerce marketplaces, wherein sponsored product listings are interleaved with organic product listings, is a large and growing phenomenon. In this paper, we both theoretically and empirically study whether including sponsored listings improves or hurts the overall quality and...

In many industries, product design and manufacturing lead-times are sufficiently long that both the quality level of a product and the amount of inventory produced must be determined before a firm knows what the actual demand will be. In this paper, we conduct a theoretical analysis of such a...

In recent decades, organized retailing has transformed the retailing landscape in emerging economies, where unorganized retailing has traditionally been dominant. In this paper, we build a theoretical model of unorganized and organized retailing in emerging economies by carefully modeling key...

In sponsored search advertising, advertisers bid to be displayed in response to a keyword search. The operational activities associated with participating in an auction — submitting the bid and the ad copy, customizing bids and ad copies based various factors (such as the geographical region...

Firms in several markets try to 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...