Under the practice of “digital co-op”, manufacturers subsidize the online advertising expenditures of retailers that they sell their products through, even though retailers typically compete with manufacturers in the advertising market and appropriate a share of the manufacturers' channel...

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...

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...

Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This paper explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking and ad fraud. These topics are not unique to...

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...

We study a scenario in which a firm designs the compensation contract for a salesperson who exerts effort to increase the level of uncertain demand and, jointly, the firm also decides the level of inventory to be stocked. We use a newsvendor-type model in which actual sales depend on the...

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...

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...