A flexible product is a menu of two or more alternatives products serving the same market. Purchasers of flexible products are assigned to one of the alternatives at a later date. Gallego and Phillips show that capacitated suppliers, such as airlines and hotels, can potentially improve revenue...

In the k-prophet problem, a decision maker observes n items sequentially and selects up to k n items without recourse to maximize the total expected reward of the selected items. We consider a soft version of the problem where the decision maker can select up to k items in expectation rather...

A pervasive problem for retailers is to make assortment and inventory procurement decisions of substitutable products with the goal of maximizing expected profits over a pre-defined selling horizon. Multiple inventory replenishments are not allowed. This problem is challenging because of demand...

We consider a game between two capacity providers that compete for customers through a broker who earns commissions on sales. The providers compete by selecting commission margins and sales targets above which the margins on all sales increase. We are interested in the form of the contracts in...

We study firms that sell multiple substitutable products and customers whose purchase behavior follows a Nested Logit model, of which the Multinomial Logit model is a special case. Customers make purchasing decision sequentially under the Nested Logit model: they first select a nest of products...

In this paper, we study how a profit-maximizing platform implements a new policy, from which a representative retailer also experiences a private externality. Our analysis suggests that: (1) when the policy is highly valuable for the platform’s own interest, the platform may charge a fee from...

Live-streaming advertising in e-commerce is soaring. Both Amazon and Alibaba have employedthis novel marketing model to engage consumers by sequentially exhibiting differentproducts through live-streaming videos. In this paper we adopt a mechanism design frameworkto model live-streaming...

This paper is concerned with a periodic-review inventory system with three consecutive delivery modes (fast, medium, and slow) and demand forecast updates. At the beginning of each period, the inventory level and demand information are updated and decisions on how much to order using each of the...

Traditional one-price-for-all extended warranties do not differentiate customers according to their risk attitudes, usage rates or operating environment. These warranties are priced to cover the cost of high usage customers who experience more failures and are willing to pay a risk premium for...