Consumers' sensitivities to price changes are an important input to strategic and tactical decisions. It has been argued that price sensitivities depend on factors such as advertising. Prior studies on the effect of advertising on consumer price sensitivity have found seemingly conflicting...

This paper investigates the relationship between market share and promotional expenditures the long run. Using data that span a decade and 91 product categories we find that market shares are stationary for a majority of the products in the data base. We find that relative promotional...

Marketing has matured to the point where it seems desirable to take stock of where we are, what we have learned, and fruitful directions for extending the knowledge base that has developed. Science is a process involving the interaction between empirical generalizations and theory. An is “a...

The practice of offering discounts to prospective customers represents a rudimentary form of using transaction history measures to customize the marketing mix. Furthermore, the proliferation of powerful customer relationship management (CRM) systems is providing the data and the communications...

Over a large number of new products and technological innovations, the Bass diffusion model (Bass 1969) describes the empirical adoption curve quite well. In this study, we generalize the Bass model to include decision variables such as price and advertising. The generalized model reduces to the...

This paper examines optimal product positioning strategies of asymmetric firms in the context of retail outlet locations in the fast food industry. The relationships between profits and product differentiation reveal that both McDonald's and Burger King are better off avoiding close competition...

Generally, profit predictions are made conditional upon a particular functional form. The typical caveat offered is that this is not the “true” demand model, but is instead some reasonable approximation. We show how the notion of an approximation can be explicitly represented using a random...

Delegating pricing decisions to the salesforce has been a salient issue for marketing academics and practitioners. We examine this issue in a competitive market using standard agency theory with symmetric and asymmetric information. Under symmetric information we find that the optimal contracts...

Many brands today introduce limited edition (LE) products as part of their product line. However, little is known about the conditions under which a brand should introduce an LE product or the competitive implications of doing so. We investigate this issue using a game theoretic model of a...

Why is it that some products carry a minimal manufacturer base warranty even though all consumers are risk-averse? Conventional wisdom suggests that it is profitable for the manufacturer to offer a comprehensive warranty in this setting. We provide in this paper an explanation for the provision...