Upward channel decentralization occurs when firms choose to not manufacture products by themselves, and procure products from upstream suppliers. Current voices from marketing scholars and practitioners have predominantly focused on the cost benefits when production is outsourced to lower-cost...

Prior empirical work shows that different markets are characterized by different pricing patterns, such as Bertrand-Nash pricing or Stackelberg leader-follower pricing. We consider a duopolistic market where ex ante identical firms sequentially position their products prior to competing on...

Store brands play many beneficial roles for retailers. While some roles such as creating a quality image for the retailer require relatively strong store brands, other roles such as segmentation of customers by income require lesser strong store brands. This paper shows another role of store...

The merger of distributed object technology, agent systems and electronic commerce enables a new generation of useful information services. With the advent of interoperable information services, markets featuring software agents as information service/product providers can be created. Meta...

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This paper examines the effect of increased product substitutability on quantity-setting firms' ability to sustain tacit collusion in a market. It uses a general demand function and the trigger strategy of Friedman (Friedman JW. 1971. A non-cooperative equilibrium for supergames. Review of...