Economists regularly decry the persistence with which firms set prices above marginal cost and thus, according to the economists, fail to maximize profits. But it is the economists who have it wrong - first, because variable accounting costs are not always a good proxy for marginal economic...

The epilogue to Supply Chain Partners: Virginia Mason and Owens & Minor (A), the B case details the outcome of the issues discussed in Case A; namely that Virginia Mason and Owens & Minor did implement the TSCC contract. Virginia Mason also kept the suture contract with O&M because the TSCC model...

Virginia Mason Medical Center (VM) hired Owens & Minor (O&M) as its alpha vendor for medical/surgical supplies in 2004. By 2005, O&M was performing JIT and LUM services for VM, but they believed the pricing model in the industry was outdated. VM and O&M partnered to create the Total Supply Chain...

Full cost data are irrational for planning and pricing decisions from a microeconomic perspective, but surveys consistently indicate that managers prefer to use full cost data to make pricing decisions. This paper presents a model, called step-ABC, that supplies full cost data but makes users...

Short-run maximization of firm profits provides the sole justification for transfers at marginal cost. This conclusion is based, however, on a theory of the firm that ignores precisely those information and agency costs that make transfer pricing necessary. An alternative approach is to...

This paper studies a periodic-review pricing and inventory control problem for a retailer, which faces stochastic price-sensitive demand, under quite general modeling assumptions. Any unsatisfied demand is lost, and any leftover inventory at the end of the finite selling horizon has a salvage...

Using theoretical analysis and simulation experiments, we examine the usefulness of full costs for product pricing. We show that full costs are economically sufficient for pricing when a decision-maker (DM) jointly solves the capacity planning and pricing problems, and has enough discretion in...

Monroe Clock Company, a producer of electrical timers, is trying to decide how to price a new device by considering the method of overhead allocation and its impact on the cost of the household timer. The B case can be taught independently or in conjunction with the A case (UVA-C-2228), which...

The reported cost of a product frequently contains historical cost components that reflect past investments in productive capacity. We examine a setting wherein a firm makes a sequence of overlapping capacity investments. Earlier research has identified particular accrual accounting...

This paper analyzes the efficiency of three simple cost based pricing heuristics in a two-period capacity planning model with uncertain demand. All policies start with full cost introductory prices but differ with respect to second period pricing. Under quot;adaptive full cost pricingquot; the...