This paper describes two new data sets available to academic researchers (at <ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="http://www.informs.org/Community/ISMS">http://www.informs.org/Community/ISMS</ext-link>). The first is a panel data set containing the transactions of 19,936 households made over the period from December 1998 to November 2004 at a major U.S. consumer electronics...

Secondary markets in the information technology industry, where used or refurbished equipment is traded, have been growing steadily. For original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in this industry, the importance of secondary markets has grown in parallel, not only as a source of revenue, but also...

Based on the proposition that leasing is environmentally superior to selling, some firms have adopted a leasing strategy and others promote their existing leasing programs as environmentally superior to "green" their image. The argument is that because a leasing firm retains ownership of the...

When learning of product characteristics takes some time, a firm introducing a new durable faces the trade-off between releasing early to an uninformed market and deferring release to a better-informed market. In a two-period monopoly, we examine the strategic interaction between exogenous...

Focused on innovation frequency of durable complementary goods, this paper shows that interdependency of innovation decisions generically gives rise to coordination failure between the producers. More importantly, the coordination failure may arise in opposite directions: Not only may the...

We study implications of habit formation for optimal taxation. First, we show that taxation problems with habit formation can be analyzed using dynamic programming techniques. Second, we derive optimal labor and savings wedges for habit formation preferences. We show that habit formation...

There have recently been suggestions for monetary policy to engineer higher inflation expectations so as to stimulate current spending. But what is the empirical relationship between in?ation expectations and spending? We use the underlying micro data from the Michigan Survey of Consumers to...

The empirical analysis confirms that household expectations have a direct role on their consumption and saving behaviour in addition to their indirect influence through the income channel. The econometric results show that there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between...

While the buzz around income inequality is reaching a crescendo, income data may not be the best measure of overall welfare. Instead, analyzing household consumption reveals that inequality is not as pervasive as skewed public discourse portrays it.

Our objective is to understand how a firm’s product development capability (PDC) affects the launch strategy for a durable product that is sequentially improved over time in a market where consumers have heterogeneous valuations for quality. We show that the launch strategy of firms is...