The open source paradigm is often defined as a collaborative effort, implying that firms and consumers come together in a non-competitive climate. We show here that open source development can arise from a competitive climate. Under competition, we find that open source is the surplus maximizing...

A general sates-advertising model is developed in which the state of the system represents a population distribution over a parameter space. With appropriate interpretations, this can include income, family size, geographic distributions, etc. Effects of information diffusion, interaction, and...

Firms that want to increase the sales of their brands through advertising have the choice of capturing market share from their competitors through brand advertising, or increasing primary demand for the category through generic advertising. In this paper, differential game theory is used to...

We analyze optimal advertising spending in a duopolistic market where each firm's market share depends on its own and its competitor''s advertising decisions, and is also subject to stochastic disturbances. We develop a differential game model of advertising in which the dynamic behavior is...

Coordinating contracts have been extensively researched in supply chain management. In this retrospect, we systematically review the profit allocation, decision sequence, and compliance aspects of these contracts. In addition to the existing concepts in the literature, we propose the notion of...

We consider a dynamic Stackelberg game between a manufacturer and a retailer facing a randomly changing market environment over time modeled as a Markov process. The manufacturer announces the wholesale price and a cooperative (co-op) advertising subsidy, and the retailer sets the retail price...

We examine an oligopoly model of advertising competition where each firm's market share depends on its own and its competitors' advertising decisions. A differential game model is developed and used to derive the closed-loop Nash equilibrium under symmetric as well as asymmetric competition. We...

This note examines the stability of an optimal control problem based on a particular stochastic extension of the Nerlove-Arrow advertising model. It is shown that depending on the parameters of the problem and the initial conditions, the optimal solution may converge monotonically or...

We explore buyback contracts in a supplier-retailer supply chain where the retailer faces a price-dependent downward-sloping demand curve subject to uncertainty. We formulate the problem as a supplier-led Stackelberg game and derive explicitly the equilibrium contract parameters along with the...

We develop a general methodology for a partially observed stochastic control problem. The dynamics is governed by a discrete-time Markov process. We describe an application to an inventory system with possibility of shrinkage, and introduce unnormalized conditional probabilities to transform the...