When modeling the behavior of firms, marketers and micro-economists routinely confront complex problems of strategic interaction. In competitive environments, firms make strategic decisions that not only depend on the features of the market, but also on their beliefs regarding the reactions of...

This article proposes a distributed Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimating Bayesian hierarchical models when the number of cross-sectional units is very large and the objects of interest are the unit-level parameters. The two-stage algorithm is asymptotically exact, retains the...

Abstract We study the welfare implications of personalized pricing, an extreme form of third-degree price discrimination implemented with machine learning for a large, digital firm. We conduct a randomized controlled pricing field experiment to train a demand model and to conduct inferences...

To have a productive sales force, firms must provide their salespeople with sales training. But from a profit-maximizing perspective, there are also reasons to limit training: training is expensive, it has diminishing returns, and trained salespeople need to be compensated at a higher level...

About 10% of the US labor force is employed in selling related occupations and the expenditures on selling activities total close to 5% of the US GDP. Without question, selling occupies a prominent role in our economy. This chapter offers a discussion on the construct of selling, its role in...