Upgrades are endemic in the software industry and create the possibility that customers might either postpone purchase or buy early on and never upgrade: When will a customer upgrade? Is it better to upgrade now or to wait for an improved version? When should we release an improved product? How...

We analyze and compare fixed-fee and usage-fee software pricing schemes - in fixed-fee pricing, all users pay the same price; in usage-fee pricing, the users' fees depend on the amount that they use the software (e.g., the user of an online-database service might be charged for each data query)....

In this paper, we analyze the contracting issues that arise in collaborative services, such as consulting, financial planning, and information technology outsourcing. In particular, we investigate how the choice of contract type--among fixed-fee, time-and-materials, and performance-based...

The classical newsvendor problem is one of optimally choosing a level of capacity to respond to a known demand distribution. The inverse newsvendor problem is one of optimally choosing a demand distribution with fixed capacity. The applications of the inverse problem include industrial settings...