The first essay considers a service center with two stations in accordance with independent Poisson processes. Service times at either station follow the same general distribution, are independent of each other and are independent of the arrival process. The system is charged station-dependent...

Even simple, deterministic rules can generate interesting behavior in dynamical systems. This dissertation examines some real world systems for which fairly simple, locally defined rules yield useful or interesting properties in the system as a whole. In particular, we study routing in...

Zusammenfassung Die Dissertation behandelt die Thematik der Unternehmensheterogenität. Die Arbeit besteht aus einem theoretischen und einem empirischen Teil. Im theoretischen Teil wird untersucht, wie sich Asymmetrien auf der Ebene der Konsumenten auf das Unternehmensverhalten auswirken. Im...

Diese Dissertation setzt sich aus fünf Forschungspapieren zusammen. Jedes Kapitel enthält ein Papier. Das erste Kapitel untersucht den Zusammenhang zwischen der Größe des Kundenstamms einer Firma und ihrem Gewinn in einem Markt mit Wechselkosten. Entgegen unserer Intuition wird gezeigt, dass...

The hotel industry continues embracing loyalty/rewards programs as a major platform to nurture customer relationships as well as reap return business. The reality is that major hotels have been aggressively spending more but achieve less in defending existing customers. We address this void by...

This dissertation aims to contribute to our understanding of dynamic interaction in duopoly markets. Chapter 1 motivates the study and offers a brief overview of the results.In Chapter 2 I study the dynamic equilibrium of a market characterized by repeat purchases. Such markets exhibit two...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has received considerable research attention over the past several decades, including a growing body of work examining consumer responses to firms’ socially-responsible initiatives. Much of this has been of an experimental design, with CSR narrowly focused...

Switching costs has been recognised as a primary reason why dissatisfied customers stay with their suppliers. While a validated multidimensional scale of switching costs exists in a business-to-consumer context, there has been little empirical research effort devoted to operationalising...

Economics is a complex system that requires different approaches for analysis. I analyzed switching costs and network effects together with a new simulation approach to modeling systems composed of autonomous and interacting agents. Agent based computational economics is one of the simulation...

Academicians and practitioners are becoming increasingly interested inthe economics of Information Technology (IT). In part, this intereststems from the increased role that IT now plays in the strategicthinking of most large organizations, and from the significant dollarcosts expended by these...