To mitigate the threat that terrorists smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States through maritime containers, the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) inspects containers upon entry to domestic ports. Inspection-driven congestion is costly, and CBP provides...

The abundance of transaction data available on the Internet tends to make information more transparent in electronic marketplaces. In such a transparent environment, it becomes easier for suppliers to obtain information that may allow them to infer their rivals' costs. Is this good news or bad...

The assumption that agents engage in maximizing behavior, while ubiquitous in economic theory, differs from the assumption that agents are willing to rely on the maximizing behavior of others. This paper offers an empirical examination of this distinction using experimental methods. Utilizing a...

We show, for a wide variety of payoff functions, that the expected log optimal portfolio is also game theoretically optimal in a single play or in multiple plays of the stock market. Thus there is no essential conflict between good short-term and long-run performance. Both are achieved by...

Upward channel decentralization occurs when firms choose to not manufacture products by themselves and procure products from upstream suppliers. Current voices from marketing scholars and practitioners have predominantly focused on the cost benefits when production is outsourced to lower-cost...

Firms often have to make their production decisions under conditions of demand uncertainty. This is especially true for product categories such as automobiles and technology goods where the lead time needed for manufacturing forces firms to make production decisions well in advance of the...

We introduce in this note the consistent organizational structure (COS) problem, which can be viewed as a generalization of the college admission and room-mates problems. Both the room-mates problem and the COS problem may have no stable solution. When side payments are allowed, the COS problem,...

This paper studies the assortment planning problem with multiple merchandise categories and basket shopping consumers (i.e., consumers who desire to purchase from multiple categories). We present a duopoly model in which retailers choose prices and variety level in each category and consumers...

We present an analytical framework for understanding what makes a product category more conducive for store brand introduction. We also investigate market characteristics that help explain differences in store brand market share across product categories. Our findings suggest that the...