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...

Traditional advertising, such as TV and print advertising, primarily builds awareness of a firm's product among consumers. On the other hand, sponsored search advertising can target consumers in a later stage of the purchase process because they self-identify themselves by searching for a...

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...

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...

In today's online environment, consumers and sellers interact through multiple channels such as email, search engines, banner ads, affiliate websites and comparison-shopping websites. In this paper, we investigate whether knowing what channels a consumer used on their path until a point of time...

E-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Alibaba and Flipkart, that match sellers and consumers at an unprecedented scale, operate their internal search engines to help buyers find relevant products from a large number of sellers, and also allow sellers to advertise to consumers for positions in...

We study how a consumer optimally allocates attention to favorable and unfavorable information related to a product before purchasing it, when information processing is costly. We find that attention allocation depends on the consumer's prior belief about whether the product matches her needs or...

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...

We study the impact of limited inventory on optimal salesforce compensation contracts. We use the framework of Oyer (2000), characterized by limited liability and rent sharing with the agent. A commonly invoked assumption in the inventory management literature is that the demand distribution...