In business-to-business settings a company's sales force often spends considerable time lobbying internally for authorization to charge lower prices. These internal lobbying activities are time consuming, and divert attention from other tasks, such as interacting with customers. We explain why...

Deadlines are common in product development and are often felt to be too harsh - many development efforts are still worth continuing at the time of mandated termination. We examine the value of deadlines from the agency-theoretic perspective. We consider a firm that pays an agent to lead product...

Understanding consumer preferences is important for new product management, but is famously challenging in the absence of actual sales data. Stated-preferences data are relatively cheap but unreliable, whereas revealed-preferences data through actual choices are reliable but expensive to obtain...

This paper studies optimal product line design when consumers need to incur costly deliberation to uncover their valuation for quality. To induce deliberation, the firm must maintain quality dispersion and cut the price of the high-end product, so that consumers are motivated to deliberate in...

There is substantial academic interest in modeling consumer experiential learning. However, (approximately) optimal solutions to forward-looking experiential learning problems are complex, limiting their behavioral plausibility and empirical feasibility. We propose that consumers use cognitively...

In April 2006, the real estate listing service in Massachusetts adopted a new policy that prohibits home sellers from resetting their properties' "days on market" through relisting. We study the effect of this new policy on home sales along the Massachusetts-Rhode Island border, using homes in...

Popularity information is usually thought to reinforce existing sales trends by encouraging customers to flock to mainstream products with broad appeal. We suggest a countervailing market force: popularity information may benefit niche products with narrow appeal disproportionately, because the...