In many economic environments agents make costly and irreversible investments (in "guns") that may enhance their respective threat payoffs but also shrink the utility possibilities set. In such settings, with variable threats and a variable utility possibilities set, it becomes possible to rank...

While it is known that information exchange (IE) in a value chain improves resource coordination, scant attention has been paid to two issues. The first issue is the effect of relative bargaining strengths of the parties on whether and how IE will be implemented. The second issue is whether a...

We describe a system for bilateral negotiations in which artificial agents aregenerated by an evolutionary algorithm (EA). The negotiations are governed bya finite-horizon version of the alternating-offers protocol. Several issuesare negotiated simulataneously. We first analyse and validate the...

Since the papers of Basu et al. (1985) and Lal and Srinivasan (1993), marketing academics have been interested in the design and implementation of optimal compensation plans. The literature has focused on agency theory as a foundation to help describe and understand this process. Although there...

We investigate a monopolist retailer's category management strategy where the main strategic decisions are how to horizontally position a store brand relative to the incumbent national brands and how to price the store and national brands for retail category profit maximization. We analyze a...

This paper examines the implementation of various solutions in differentiable concave production economies with one privately owned input, one output, and publicly owned production technology. The public ownership solutions we focus on are the Proportional Solution (PS) and the Equal Benefit...