Movie studios often have to choose among thousands of scripts to decide which ones to turn into movies. Despite the huge amount of money at stake, this process--known as green-lighting in the movie industry--is largely a guesswork based on experts' experience and intuitions. In this paper, we...

Consumer reservation price is a key concept in marketing and economics. Theoretically, this concept has been instrumental in studying consumer purchase decisions,competitive pricing strategies,and welfare economics. Managerially,knowledge of consumer reservation prices is critical for...

We examine the key factors that influence a firm's decision whether to use front-loaded or rear-loaded incentives. When using price packs, direct mail coupons, FSI coupons or peel-off coupons, consumers obtain an immediate benefit upon purchase or a front-loaded incentive. However, when buying...

Many established industries, such as the online service industry, the telecommunication industry, or the fitness club industry, are access service industries. When using services in these industries, consumers pay for the privilege of accessing the firm's facilities but do not acquire any right...

In this note, we explore channel interactions in an information-intensive environment where the retailer can implement personalized pricing and the manufacturer can leverage both personalized pricing and entry into a direct distribution channel. We study whether a retailer can benefit from...

Retailers have long recognized that some categories are more important than others in consumers' store choice decisions. The overall profitability of a store requires careful category-level merchandising decisions to draw the most desirable consumers into the store. However, the traditional...

With the advent of panel data on household purchase behavior, and the development of statistical procedures to utilize this data, firms can now target coupons to selected households with considerable accuracy and cost effectiveness. In this article, we develop an analytical framework to examine...

Our research investigates the competitive ramifications of individual marketing and information management in today's information-intensive marketing environments. The specific managerial issues we address are as follows. First, what kinds of incentive environments do competing firms face when...

How should a firm decide whether or not to enter an untested market when a competing firm is vying for the same market? Should a firm always speed to the market in an effort to capitalize on pioneering advantages? We address those questions by developing a simple game-theoretical model that...

Price-matching guarantees are widely used in consumer and industrial markets. Previous studies argue that they are a marketing tactic that facilitates implicit price collusion. This is because once a store adopts this marketing tactic, its rivals can no longer steal its customers by undercutting...