Overconfidence is one of the most consistent, powerful, and widespread cognitive biases affecting decision making in situations characterized by random outcomes. In this paper, we study the effects and implications of overconfidence in a competitive newsvendor setting. In this context,...

This paper investigates the impacts of transshipment between overconfident newsvendors who perceive the expected outcome of an uncertain event as more certain than it actually is. The conventional wisdom is that transshipment is a risk-pooling strategy for improving newsvendors’ performance....

Firms often encourage and reward existing customers for bringing in new customers. In collaboration with a (top 500) Chinese firm, we conduct one randomized field experiment and find that, although a referral reward unequivocally enhances the existing customers’ incentives to refer new...

The DuPont decomposition of profitability into profit margin and asset turnover has been applied extensively to forecast future profits. This paper provides a complementary analysis under which the DuPont decomposition also informs about the risk that profits may differ from expectation. In the...

In this paper, we study a regretful seller’s problem of selling a fixed number of goods over a finite and known time horizon. The seller engages in counterfactual thinking to compare her selected price with other forgone alternatives. If a forgone alternative (ex post) generates a better...

Procuring essential products under extreme urgency can save lives and livelihoods, whereas limited research has explored this critical issue. In this paper, we collaborate with a global buying company to run a field experiment during the early COVID-19 outbreak that prompts an emergent need for...

The field experiment is an established and powerful method to investigate economics and business questions. However, operations management has embraced field experiments only in recent years. In this paper, we review the existing operations management literature that leverages field experiments....

Firms often encourage existing customers to recruit new customers. In this paper, we analytically study the customer referrals in a two-period newsvendor model, where the demand generated by referrals increases in the previous sales. In this framework, we establish the structural results for the...