Retailers and their suppliers often exchange demand information, which is believed to benefit both firms and consumers. We show how such information exchange can benefit only the upstream supplier at the expense of the downstream retailer and consumers.

The personal video recorder (PVR) facilitates the use of targeted advertising by allowing companies to monitor television viewing behavior and to build demographic profiles of viewers from the data that are collected. Our research explores the extent to which an advertiser should allocate...

In the present paper we identify those characteristics of the markets served by a franchise chain which determine the relative incentives of the owner of the chain to monitor the behavior of individual franchisees. We find that the owner has greater incentives to monitor the outlets that serve...

While retailers have sales data to forecast demand, manufacturers have a broad understanding of the market and the coming trends. It is well known that pooling such demand information within a distribution channel improves supply chain logistics. However, little is known about how...

We show that when a single media content distributor (such as a television cable company or an Internet provider) delivers advertising messages on behalf of multiple competing brands, it can sometimes utilize customized advertising to implement monopoly pricing. Even though such monopolistic...

In this paper, we extend the standard Hotelling model of product differentiation to incorporate a second dimension of consumer heterogeneity that relates to the quantity of the product consumers wish to buy. This extension allows us to derive optimal nonlinear pricing rules chosen by competing...

We examine an incumbent's trade-off between the improved efficiency that business expansion facilitates and the signaling role that business expansion plays in conveying information to potential entrants about the state of demand. We demonstrate that both separating and pooling equilibria...

The author's goal is to predict whether horizontal mergers can gene rate informational advantages to firms facing a stochastic market. At the Cournot equilibrium, each nonmerging firm benefits from an informational advantage that exceeds the informational advantage (if it exists) of each merging...