Customer satisfaction incentive schemes are increasingly common in a variety of industries. We offer explanations as to how and when incenting employees on customer satisfaction is profitable and offer several recommendations for improving upon current practice. Faced with employee groups...

The paper offers a comparative analysis of different ways to sell products (selling formats) when buyers incur evaluation costs. Since these costs are sunk at the moment of trade, buyers may refrain from incurring them for fear of later opportunism on the part of sellers. It is found that the...

We identify conditions under which a bargainer makes inefficiently large (small) investments in a search for information about the opponent's reservation price. The analysis starts with the observation that a player will invest too much (too little) if the opponent's expected payoff is...

Business Portfolio Planning techniques often suggest that firms should invest in industries with high profitability, high growth, or other attractive characteristics. Critiquing this view, we suggest that the same factors which lead to high profitability in an industry may cause its inefficient...

Several papers in the recent marketing literature have suggested that delegation in distribution (e.g., the use of independent middlemen) helps manufacturers to precommit strategically to profit-enhancing competitive actions. Further, the literature suggests that the profitability of such...

An economic theory of habit formation through consumption learning is developed to explain order differences in relative sales promotion expenditures among brands. The theory applies to consumer brands in equilibrium markets, where consumer information from sources other than advertising, sales...

We look at a principal-agent model in which the agent has to perform an action, the difficulty of which is better known ex interim than ex ante. We compare two contracting regimes; one with commitment to an ex ante negotiated contract, and one with an ex interim negotiated contract. The ex ante...

We ask how bargainers' incentives to communicate about more efficient widget designs depend on whether they negotiate price prior to, or after, fixing the traded design. We find three effects: (1) Since communication reveals information about preferences, bargainers with little power prefer to...

This article explores the possibility that consumers use market data to make inferences about product utilities. The argument is made by means of an example based on the "compromise effect" found in extant experimental data. This phenomenon is generally looked at as a manifestation of deviations...