Many established industries, such as the online service industry, the telecommunication industry, or the fitness club industry, are access service industries. When using services in these industries, consumers pay for the privilege of accessing the firm's facilities but do not acquire any right...

In this note, we explore channel interactions in an information-intensive environment where the retailer can implement personalized pricing and the manufacturer can leverage both personalized pricing and entry into a direct distribution channel. We study whether a retailer can benefit from...

Critics have long faulted the wide-spread practice of trade promotions as wasteful. It has been estimated that this practice adds up to $100 billion worth of inventory to the distribution system. Yet, the practice continues. In this paper, we propose a price discrimination model of trade...

Retailers have long recognized that some categories are more important than others in consumers' store choice decisions. The overall profitability of a store requires careful category-level merchandising decisions to draw the most desirable consumers into the store. However, the traditional...

With the advent of panel data on household purchase behavior, and the development of statistical procedures to utilize this data, firms can now target coupons to selected households with considerable accuracy and cost effectiveness. In this article, we develop an analytical framework to examine...

The retail trade today is increasingly dominated by large, centrally managed “power retailers.” In this paper, we develop a channel model in the presence of a dominant retailer to examine how a manufacturer can best coordinate such a channel. We show that such a channel can be coordinated to...

Our research investigates the competitive ramifications of individual marketing and information management in today's information-intensive marketing environments. The specific managerial issues we address are as follows. First, what kinds of incentive environments do competing firms face when...

How should a firm decide whether or not to enter an untested market when a competing firm is vying for the same market? Should a firm always speed to the market in an effort to capitalize on pioneering advantages? We address those questions by developing a simple game-theoretical model that...

Price-matching guarantees are widely used in consumer and industrial markets. Previous studies argue that they are a marketing tactic that facilitates implicit price collusion. This is because once a store adopts this marketing tactic, its rivals can no longer steal its customers by undercutting...

During development of an innovative product there is often considerable uncertainty about component production cost, and it is of interest for both the manufacturer and the supplier to engage in a collaborative effort to reduce this uncertainty and lower the expected cost. Despite the obvious...