The recent literature argues that offering consumer returns, such as money-back guarantees (MBGs), reduces quality differentiation in competitive markets. We show that this argument does not hold in general. We propose a new certainty-equivalent approach, which shows that offering product...

In this study, we consider a decentralized agricultural supply chain consisting of a capital-constrained smallholder farmer and an intermediary platform. The smallholder farmer sells the agricultural products through the intermediary platform but lacks the financial resources for production. In...

In the presence of different standards for PPE products, for example, both N95 and KN95 mask types are similar with the same filtration systems tested by capturing salt particles, but they are produced according to different standards. The N95 standard was developed by National Institute for...

Recently, manufacturers have not only sold through retailers, but also started to directly access customers via online intermediaries by paying a proportional fee. This paper studies the incentive for the intermediaries' vertical demand information sharing with the manufacturers and retailers...

We consider a three-layer supply chain with a manufacturer, a reseller, and a sales agent. The demand is stochastically determined by the random market condition and the sales agent's private effort level. While the manufacturer is uninformed about the market condition, the reseller and the...

We consider a retailer investing in two monitoring functions for unobservable demand and salesperson's effort. We show that improving effort monitoring is more effective. Moreover, demand monitoring may be less preferable when it becomes relatively cheaper and balancing these two may be worse...

Economic growth in many countries is increasingly driven by successful startups that operate as online platforms. These success stories have motivated us to define and classify various online platforms according to their business models. This study discusses strategic and operational issues...

We consider two firms selling products to a market of network-connected customers. Each firm is selling one product and the two products are substitutable. The customers make purchases based on the multinomial logit model and the firms compete for their purchasing probabilities. We characterize...