A firm faces random demand for a service it delivers on a given future date. To boost demand, the firm hires a sales agent who exerts unobservable effort continuously over time. The firm is concerned not only with increasing current demand, but also with smoothing demand over time to avoid...

This paper studies the pre-order strategy that a seller may use to sell a perishable product in an uncertain market with heterogeneous consumers. By accepting pre-orders, the seller is able to obtain advance demand information for inventory planning and price-discriminate the consumers. Given...

This paper studies the impact of supply reliability on a retail firm's performance under joint marketing and inventory decisions. The firm sells a product in a single selling season and can exert marketing effort to influence consumer demand. We develop a modeling framework to quantify the value...

Inventory availability has been widely recognized as an important leverage to enhance the competitive edge of a firm. We study the competition between two retailers who compete on both price and inventory availability. Competition on inventory availability may have important implications on...

Trade-in remanufacturing is a commonly adopted business practice under which firms collect used products for remanufacturing by allowing repeat customers to trade in used products for upgraded ones at a discount price. This paper studies how customer purchasing behavior and remanufacturing...