Providing customer service is important for firms to acquire new customers and retain repeat customers in a competitive marketplace. As technology advances, firms can recognize customers from their purchase history data and price discriminate between repeat and new customers. Existing literature...

Informative advertising and persuasive advertising play quite different roles in the efficiency of distribution channels. A recent study observes that a direct channel structure outperforms an indirect one in the presence of advertising competition between manufacturers, assuming that...

Effect of coupling displacement on thermal current of Frenkel-Kontorova (FK) lattices in the underdamped case is investigated by means of numerical calculations. The results indicate that: (i) as the system has less atoms and is symmetric, the coupling displacement can boost up its thermal...

An Ms7.0 earthquake, focal depth 13 km, struck Lushan on April 20, 2013, caused 196 deaths and 21 missing, 13,484 injuries, and affected more than two million people. A field investigation was taken immediately after the quake, and the induced hazards were analyzed in comparison with the...

Consumers experience a sense of loss when a product's quality does not match their expectations. To alleviate consumer loss aversion (CLA), firms can disclose information to reduce consumers' uncertainty about product quality and the resulting psychological loss. In this paper, we investigate...