Sales contests are short-term incentives used by managers to raise sales effort. The extant marketing theory predicts that the optimal prize structure should have two characteristics: 1) The number of prizewinners should be greater than one; and 2) prize values should be unique and rank-ordered....

We propose a behavioral theory to predict actual ordering behavior in multi-location inventory systems. The theory rests on a well-known stylized fact of human behavior: People's preferences are reference-dependent. We incorporate reference-dependence into the newsvendor framework by assuming...

This dissertation consists of two essays on pricing contracts in marketing. Both essays incorporate important behavioral elements into the firms' pricing strategies. This not only yields more empirically-grounded models, but also explains why observed pricing behavior is often different from the...

Marketing is an applied science that tries to explain and influence how firms and consumers actually behave in markets. Marketing models are usually applications of economic theories. These theories are general and produce precise predictions, but they rely on strong assumptions of rationality...

Much of experimental research in marketing has focused on individual choices. Yet in many contexts, the outcomes of one’s choices depend on the choices of others. Furthermore, the results obtained in individual decision making context may not be applicable to these strategic choices. In this...

We model an expert review system where two producers competing for market share each are evaluated by two raters. Employing economics experiments, the paper examines how the rater’s incentive to provide objective feedback can be distorted in the presence of social ties and different penalty...

This paper reviews the literature that applies behavioral economic models to managerial decisions. It organizes the literature into research that focuses on alternative utility functions and research that focuses on non-equilibrium models. Generally, behavioral models have seen less application...