Managers like to think well of themselves, and of the firms that employ them. However, positive illusions can bias a manager's evaluation of market outcomes, self-servingly crediting success on the superior quality of one's own product but blaming failure on the aggressive price of a...

Advertising supported content sampling is ubiquitous in online markets for digital information goods. Yet, little is known about the profit impact of sampling when it serves the dual purpose of disclosing content quality and generating advertising revenue. This paper proposes an analytical...

Managers like to think well of themselves, and of the firms that employ them. However, positive illusions can bias a manager's evaluation of market outcomes, self-servingly crediting success on the superior quality of one's own product but blaming failure on the aggressive price of a...

Should a provider deliver a reliable service or should it allow for occasional service failures? This paper derives conditions under which randomizing service quality can benefit the provider and society. In addition to cost considerations, heterogeneity in customer damages from service failures...

We describe a model examining how a firm might choose the package size and price for a product that deteriorates over time. Our model considers four factors: (1) the usable life of the product; (2) the rates at which consumers use the product; (3) the relation between package size and the...

In many industries firms have to make quantity decisions before knowing the exact state of demand. In such cases, channel members have to decide which firm will own the units until demand uncertainty is resolved. The decision about who should retain ownership depends on the balance of benefit...

The use of a durable good is limited by both its physical life and usable life. For example, an electric-car battery can last for 5 years (physical life) or 100,000 miles (usable life), whichever comes first. We propose a framework for examining how a profit-maximizing firm might choose the...