Price discrimination is generally thought to improve firm profits by allowing firms to extract more consumer surplus. In competition, however, price discrimination may also be costly to the firm because restrictive incentive compatibility conditions may allow the competing firm to gain market...

In today’s media ecosystem, advertisers face the challenge to create ad campaigns with the ability to engage consumers and ultimately increase conversions. Hence, they need guidance on how to design promising ad copies and on which websites to deliver these ads. In this study, the authors...

Casual observation suggests manufacturers continue offering trade promotions while complaining that trade promotions are unprofitable. Recent empirical work finds that retailer response to trade promotions can be better understood by viewing retailers as maximizing category profits rather than...

Jain (Jain, S. 2012. Marketing of vice goods: A strategic analysis of the package size decision. Marketing Sci. 31(1) 36-51) examines the impact of consumers' self-control problem on the equilibrium package sizes offered by firms marketing vice goods. This series of discussions offers...

Managing merchants challenges a selling platform. Using a multi-sender framework we ask if a platform and a competing merchant’s prices can together signal product quality if consumers’ information is incomplete. We find that both separating and pooling equilibria exist but for separation...

Many customers visit several online platforms before making a product purchase. These online platforms often offer multiple "ad positions" that advertisers can obtain via bidding in an auction. The ad positions differ in their "prominence" - the probability of engaging incoming visitors. We...

This paper examines the strategic rivalry in a duopoly where firms must correctly time the construction of the first plant in a growing market. We explicitly model rivalry for market share. Firms recognize the effect of the rival's actions on their profits; they behave noncooperatively to...

This paper offers the generalization that competitive promotions are mixed strategies. First an empirical regularity is established that promotions are independent across competitors. This regularity is then elaborated on in the context of a promotion game. The promotion game is linked to...

This paper considers the question of how a sales manager should design the optimal compensation scheme for his salesforce when it consists of salespersons of varying selling skills, i.e., when the salesforce is heterogeneous. The manager's problem is to reward the salespersons based on...

This paper develops a modeling framework for making promotions decisions. In contrast to some of the prior research, the framework explicitly models promotions. Its central feature is the view of promotions competition as a multistage game in which regular prices are chosen first, followed by...