Franchising organizations were prevalent for uniform offline stores, but nowadays they face severe challenges from third-party online competitors. While the literature mainly consists of studies that focus on within-franchise relationships and the encroachment of an individual franchisor's...

We consider two firms selling products to a market of network-connected customers. Each firm is selling one product and the two products are substitutable. The customers make purchases based on the multinomial logit model and the firms compete for their purchasing probabilities. We characterize...

Established findings suggest that strategic inventory may alleviate double marginalization and improve the efficiency of a decentralized distribution channel. In this paper, we examine the effect of strategic inventory in the presence of chain-to-chain competition. We show that as the...