(1) Problem definition: We study a special form of group buying: the group buying succeeds only if the number of sign-ups reaches a preset threshold, with no duration constraint. Customers with heterogeneous valuations arrive sequentially and decide between signing up for the group buying or...

In online reward-based crowdfunding platforms, backers often pledge more money than necessary. This paper studies the magnitude, types, and motivations of such prosocial funding behavior, using a pledge-level data set from Kickstarter. First, prosocial funding was common (22% of backers),...

The sharing economy, a term we use to refer to business models built around on-demand access to products and services mediated by online platforms that match many small suppliers or service providers to many small buyers, has emerged as an important area of study in operations management. We...

Price fluctuations in agricultural markets are an obstacle to poverty reduction for small-scale farmers in developing countries. We build a micro-foundation to study how farmers of heterogeneous production costs, under price fluctuations, make crop-planting decisions over time to maximize their...

Competing technologies in emerging industries create uncertainties that can discourage supplier investments. Open technology may induce supplier investments, but may also lead to intensified future competition. In this paper, we study competing manufacturers' open-technology strategies. We show...

Operations management has the tradition of coming from and going back to real-life applications. It deals with the management of the process of matching supply with demand. The emerging business process in a sharing economy or an innovative marketplace calls for active management. We take a...

Surge pricing in ride hailing platforms is a pivotal and controversial subject. In this paper, we investigate surge pricing from a temporal perspective; in particular, we highlight the strategic behavior by riders and drivers and that drivers respond to surge pricing much slower than riders. We...

Many traditional retailers and e-tailers like Walmart and Amazon have been implementing omnichannel strategies, such as buy-online pickup-at-store (BOPS), buy-online ship-to-store (BOSS), and buy-online ship-from-store (BOFS). We build a stylized model to investigate the impacts of these...

Motivated by the emerging sharing economy, we study an on-demand matching platform that crowdsources a service from independent suppliers and sells it to customers. The platform offers a wage to the supply side and charges a price to the demand side. We consider a set of market conditions, under...

Vertical mergers within a multi-echelon market result in equilibrium price changes, for wholesalers and retailers, alike. They may also impact the product variety that is available to the consumer, i.e., the equilibrium product assortment sold in the market. In this paper, we consider the...