In many services markets such as consulting, auto-repair, financial planning and healthcare, the service provider may have more information about the customer's problem than the customer, and different customers may impose different costs on the service provider. In principle, the service...

While millions of products are sold on its retail platform, Amazon.com itself stocks and sells only a small fraction of them. Most of these products are sold by third-party sellers, who pay Amazon a fee for each unit sold. Empirical evidence clearly suggests that Amazon tends to sell high-demand...

In recent years, mobile communications technologies and online sharing platforms have made collaborative consumption among consumers a major trend in the economy. Consumers buy many products but end up not fully utilizing them. A product owner's self-use values can differ over time, and in a...

Bundling can change consumers' choice set and affect their purchase decision. It is well-documented that consumers' preferences depend on the bundling context. In this paper, we investigate the effects of consumers' context-dependent preferences (CDPs) on the firm's optimal bundling strategy in...

We consider a platform that matches service providers with potential customers. Ratings of a service provider reveal the quality of his service while ratings of a consumer reveal the cost to serve her. Under a competitive search framework, we study how bilateral ratings influence market...

When a firm introduces a product with new features, some consumers may find it difficult to assess their valuations for these new attributes. Their purchase decisions made under such uncertainty may lead to post-purchase regret. It has been experimentally shown that consumers anticipate their...

Consumers with inequity aversion experience some psychological disutility when buying products at unfair prices. Empirical evidence and behavioral research suggest that consumers may perceive a firm's price as unfair when its profit margin is too high relative to consumers' surplus. We develop a...

This paper studies information sharing in a distribution channel where the manufacturer possesses better demand-forecast information than the downstream retailer. We examine three information-sharing formats: no information sharing (i.e., the manufacturer ex ante commits to not sharing its...

Anand and Goyal (2009) propose a horizontal differentiation model to study information leakage and demand signaling in a supply chain. The authors present a composite equilibrium consisting of separating and pooling outcomes in different parameter regions and claim that it satisfies the...

Customers can sometimes learn unanticipated or hidden use value of a firm's product whereas the non-customers remain uninformed about that extra value. A monopolist will increase its profit by informing the non-customers of its product's hidden value. However, our analysis reveals that this may...