The importance of knowledge and skills in meeting new challenges in production and distribution is particularly evident in today’s market, which is characterized by a saturation of products and strong competition. To be successful in the market, companies must stand out and be creative and...

We study effects of a firm's attempt to optimize an existing incentive scheme to increase sales growth for direct store delivery workers. Before optimization workers reported Ratchet Effects that lowered productivity. The altered incentive plan offered higher compensation for increased sales...

Three concepts from psychology -- cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, and confirmation bias -- are perhaps surprisingly closely related, and have been used productively in a variety of fields in economics, more so over time. These concepts are relevant to the field of industrial...

In the past two decades, pricing research has paid increasing attention to instances where a product's price is divided into a base price and one or more mandatory surcharges, a practice termed partitioned pricing. Recently, partitioned pricing strategies in the marketplace have become more...

This paper considers a firm that has to delegate to an agent, such as a mortgage broker or a security dealer, the twin tasks of approaching and advising customers. The main contractual restriction, in particular in light of related research in Inderst and Ottaviani (2007), is that the firm can...

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...

I study agency problems between brokers and investors in the retail bond market. Thepresence of suitability or fiduciary regulations, which govern transactions in this setting, canlead to tensions for brokers between maximizing their own profit and acting in the best interestsof their customers....