We study how a consumer optimally allocates attention to favorable and unfavorable information related to a product before purchasing it, when information processing is costly. We find that attention allocation depends on the consumer's prior belief about whether the product matches her needs or...

Advertising to a consumer moves her further along the purchase journey, and tracking the consumer's online activities enables the advertiser to infer her purchase journey stage and target her accordingly. However, many consumers dislike being tracked, and repeated advertising leads to ad...

Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This paper explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking and ad fraud. These topics are not unique to...

We study a scenario in which firms offering products of different qualities can use persuasive advertising to influence consumers' preferences and perceptions about product quality. Consumers have an absolute and a relative component of utility from quality, and derive diminishing marginal...

We study the impact of limited inventory on optimal salesforce compensation contracts. We use the framework of Oyer (2000), characterized by limited liability and rent sharing with the agent. A commonly invoked assumption in the inventory management literature is that the demand distribution...

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...

In recent years, online retailers (e-tailers) have started allowing manufacturers direct access to their customers while charging a fee for providing this access, a format commonly referred to as agency selling. In this paper, we use a stylized theoretical model to answer a key question that...

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 recent decades, organized retailing has transformed the retailing landscape in emerging economies, where unorganized retailing has traditionally been dominant. In this paper, we build a theoretical model of unorganized and organized retailing in emerging economies by carefully modeling key...