Sales presentations are the core of the selling process where salespeople provide information to prospects. One challenge is that the amount of information available to be potentially communicated may exceed salespeople's ability to communicate or customers' ability to process: there is limited...

Researchers and business thought leaders have emphasized that, towards maximizing the lifetime value of customers, firms must manage customer relationships for the long term. In contrast to this recommendation, we demonstrate that firm profits in competitive environments are maximized when...

Researchers and business thought leaders have emphasized that firms must think and act with a long-term horizon when managing customer relationships. We demonstrate that, in contrast to this widely held view, profits in competitive environments may be maximized when firms ignore the future and...

The existing literature has examined how manufacturers can enhance profits by employing specific channel structures and channel coordination mechanisms. In this paper, we examine the implications of strategically designed managerial incentives for channel performance in a duopoly. We first...

The pharmaceutical industry has always used sales representatives to target physicians (detailing), who are a key link in sales and market share for prescription pharmaceuticals. Since August of 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration eased the restrictions on direct-to-consumer advertising...

Researchers and managers broadly agree that coordination and harmony between manufacturing and marketing improve firm performance by eliminating suboptimal practices within the firm. In this paper, we present a contrasting view of the manufacturing-marketing interface. We model a duopoly in...

Companies and managers are apt to forget information, yet classic game theory analysis assumes that all players have perfect recall. This paper expands the literature by examining how introducing forgetfulness into a multiplayer game-theoretic framework can help or hinder cooperative behavior....

An outstanding problem in marketing is why some firms in a competitive market delegate pricing decisions to agents and other firms do not. This paper analyzes the impact of competition on the delegation decision and, in turn, the impact of delegation on prices and incentives. The theory builds...

We investigate the evolution of online ratings over time and sequence. We first establish that there exist two distinct dynamic processes, one as a function of the amount of time a book has been available for review and another as a function of the sequence of reviews themselves. We find that,...

We investigate a business-to-business context and ask <i>when</i> and <i>why</i> a firm should announce a "reference program" that commits the firm to facilitating the flow of information about the efficacy of its products from early adopters to potential late adopters. We model a monopolist manufacturer with...