Unprecedented changes in the economics of interaction, mainly as a result of advances in information and telecommunication technologies such as the Internet, are causing a shift toward more networked forms of organizations such as horizontal alliances---that is, alliances among firms in similar...

Upward channel decentralization occurs when firms choose to not manufacture products by themselves and procure products from upstream suppliers. Current voices from marketing scholars and practitioners have predominantly focused on the cost benefits when production is outsourced to lower-cost...

We study the effects of entry in a downstream market where firms (e.g., Compaq and IBM; CVS and Safeway) buy an input (e.g., microprocessor, grocery items) from an upstream supplier (e.g., Intel, Procter & Gamble) and sell their output to consumers. We show demand conditions where, contrary to...

Consumers incur many transaction costs in purchasing and using most products. This paper examines the effects of a reduction in such consumer transaction costs caused by market-level technological advances. Using a model in which consumers are simultaneously heterogeneous in their transaction...

This paper examines the product positioning decisions of firms that enter a market sequentially and that have potentially different cost structures. It shows that if the first mover knows the second mover to have a lower production cost, it positions away from the most attractive location in the...

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This paper examines the economics of pricing practices at artificial reproductive clinics, which have introduced money-back guarantees (MBGs) for in vitro fertilization. We identify incentives for clinics to offer MBGs and evaluate the impact on couples' choices and on social welfare....

Store brands play many beneficial roles for retailers. While some roles such as creating a quality image for the retailer require relatively strong store brands, other roles such as segmentation of customers by income require lesser strong store brands. This paper shows another role of store...

This paper examines the effect of increased product substitutability on quantity-setting firms' ability to sustain tacit collusion in a market. It uses a general demand function and the trigger strategy of Friedman (Friedman JW. 1971. A non-cooperative equilibrium for supergames. Review of...