The Thanksgiving-Christmas holiday period is a major sales period for US retailers. Due to higher store traffic, tasks such as restocking shelves, handling customers' questions and inquiries, running cash registers, cleaning, and bagging, become more urgent during holidays. As a result, the...

Die Bedeutung des Servicegeschäfts der Industrieunternehmen nimmt zu und die Unternehmen wollen sich mit ihrem Serviceangebot differenzieren und Erlösmöglichkeiten ausschöpfen. Die Umsetzung gelingt den Unternehmen oft nur mittelmäßig. Dieser Artikel zeigt, mit welchen Maßnahmen...

This paper investigates situations where a sizeable sub-set of consumers prefer an inferior (dominated) offer made by an established brand to a superior (dominating) offer made by a less-established brand. Established brands are those for which consumers hold more confident beliefs concerning...

How do firms cope with the challenges of disruptive change in their industry? Numerous studies have highlighted that success with any prior technology creates a negative legacy effect for the next radical technological shift. We question the overly pessimistic view of such legacy effects and ask...

The internet offers market researchers a broad variety of possibilities to gather information and insights. Online surveys and online observations are to commonly used research methods. In this article, both methods are being compared and their possible value proposition in terms of brand...

The term 'global brand' has become widely used by the media and by consumers. Business week publishes annually its widely known ranking of the 'Best Global Brands' (with Coca-Cola as number 1 in the past years) and consumers on summer vacations purchase brands such as Heineken or Marlboro they...

This paper considers a firm that has to delegate to an agent, such as a mortgage broker or a security dealer, the twin tasks of approaching and advising customers. The main contractual restriction, in particular in light of related research in Inderst and Ottaviani (2007), is that the firm can...

This paper analyzes the implications of the inherent conflict between two tasks performed by direct marketing agents: prospecting for customers and advising on the product's suitability for the specific needs of customers. When structuring sales-force compensation, firms trade off the expected...

The importance of users as a source of information for company innovation activity was raised in the 1980s by von Hippel. Today, a concept of a similar basis is known and developed in Europe under the name of User-Driven Innovation (UDI). The UDI is based on the belief that enterprises which are...

Crowdfunding provides innovation in enabling entrepreneurs to contract with consumers before investment. Under aggregate demand uncertainty, this improves screening for valuable projects. Entrepreneurial moral hazard and private cost information threatens this benefit. Despite these threats,...