Consider a firm facing two consumer segments with differing valuations for quality. The demand is stationary and known, and consumers make repeat purchase. However, once a premium product is introduced, the valuations of the consumers change in the next period. The firm derives a cost savings...

Consider a supply chain involving an independent retailer and an independent manufacturer. The manufacturer produces a single product and sells it exclusively through the retailer. Using this supply chain framework, we develop a game theoretic model to study two commonly observed practices of...

The Zipf distribution is known to describe various natural phenomena, including city populations in the United States, frequency of English words in literature, immune system response in human beings, and certain aspects of Internet traffic. Using data from 70 markets, we show that the market...

This paper, motivated by the experiences of major US-based broadcast television network, presents algorithms and heuristics to schedule commercial videotapes. Major advertisers purchase several slots to air commercials during a given time period on a broadcast network. We study the problem of...

Consider two manufacturers, each producing a single substitutable product. In any geographical area, there are two retail outlets through which the products are sold to the end consumers. Each of the two retail outlets could be privately owned (i.e. a franchised outlet) or owned by the...