We study a scenario in which a firm designs the compensation contract for a salesperson who exerts effort to increase the level of uncertain demand and, jointly, the firm also decides the level of inventory to be stocked. We use a newsvendor-type model in which actual sales depend on the...

As sponsored search becomes increasingly important as an advertising medium for firms, search engines are exploring more advanced bidding and ranking mechanisms to increase their revenue from auctions for sponsored search advertising. For instance, Google, Yahoo! and Bing are experimenting with...

In sponsored search advertising, advertisers bid to be displayed in response to a keyword search. The operational activities associated with participating in an auction — submitting the bid and the ad copy, customizing bids and ad copies based various factors (such as the geographical region...

In today's online environment, consumers and sellers interact through multiple channels such as email, search engines, banner ads, affiliate websites and comparison-shopping websites. In this paper, we investigate whether knowing what channels a consumer used on their path until a point of time...

In many industries, product design and manufacturing lead-times are sufficiently long that both the quality level of a product and the amount of inventory produced must be determined before a firm knows what the actual demand will be. In this paper, we conduct a theoretical analysis of such a...