How should forward-looking managers plan advertising if they envision a product-harm crisis in the future? To address this question, we propose a dynamic model of brand advertising in which, at each instant, a non-zero probability exists for the occurrence of a crisis event, which damages the...

Companies invest millions of dollars in various forms of marketing communications to impact customers' awareness, attitudes, purchases and, ultimately, profitability. An important question for marketers and shareholders alike is: what effects do marketing investments have on market performance?...

An infinite-horizon differential game between a manufacturer and a retailer is considered. The players control their marketing efforts and the sales share of the online channel is the state of the system. The manufacturer seeks to maximize her profit made on both the indirect and direct channels...

We consider an infinite-horizon differential game played by two direct marketers. Each player controls the number of emails sent to potential customers at each moment in time. There is a cost associated to the messages sent, as well as a potential reward. The latter is assumed to depend on the...

Blood banks rely on marketing to encourage donors to give blood. Many, if not most, blood banks in the U.S. are community-based not-for-profit organizations with limited marketing budgets. As a result, blood banks increasingly use novel and inexpensive online media, i.e., paid, owned and earned...

Data policies in platform environments drive choices made by firms and consumers. The distinctive feature of platform businesses is how the combination of network effects with data analytics drives choices made by platforms themselves, as well as by their complementors and consumers. We explore...

Conflicts between marketing and sales functions concerning customer acquisition process in business-to-business firms hurt profits. Marketing claims that sales disregards qualified leads; sales questions lead quality. To address such conflicts and avoid threats to profits, we consider several...

How should firms price new products when they don't know the timing, nor the nature of the next competitive entry? To guide managers' pricing decisions in such contexts, we propose a dynamic pricing model with two types of randomly timed entry, i.e. imitative and innovative. The characterization...

De Fleur (1956) provides the earliest evidence of diminishing returns. He finds a common logarithmic pattern for leaflets dropped and message recalled in field experiment. Since then, many researchers have applied logarithmic or square root patterns to capture the effect of diminishing returns...

In Markov-switching regression models, we use Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the true and candidate models to select the number of states and variables simultaneously. In applying Akaike information criterion (AIC), which is an estimate of KL divergence, we find that AIC retains too...