We explore the phenomena of game companies offering to pay users in "virtual" benefits to take actions in-game that earn the game company revenue from third parties. Examples of such "incentivized actions" include paying users in "gold coins" to watch video advertising and speeding in-game...

Motivated by the growing significance of contingent free shipping (CFS) policies in the e-commerce industry, we investigate the optimal CFS and pricing decisions for online retailers. Under a CFS policy, consumers enjoy free shipping for orders exceeding a certain threshold value; otherwise, they...

Problem Definition. Putting customer experience at the heart of service design has become a governing principle of today’s “experience economy.” Echoing this principle, our paper addresses a service designer’s problem of how to select and sequence activities in designing a service...

In the service industry, a service provider may sell a collection of service activities as a package, also known as a service bundle. Empirical studies indicate that the customer's ex-post perception of a service bundle depends on not only the utility of each activity but also the sequence of...

In the mobile video games industry, in-app purchases are a major source of revenue. A common in-app purchase is for additional "moves" or "time" in puzzle games. We call these in-app purchases "bonus actions". In some games, bonus actions can only be purchased in advance of attempting a level of...

This paper studies a class of ranking and selection problems faced by a company that wants to identify the most preferred product out of a finite set of alternatives when consumer preferences are a priori unknown. The only information available is that consumer preferences satisfy two key...

Cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB), as a promising sludge dewatering conditioner, its underlying dewatering mechanism has not been deeply understood so far. This study therefore aims to fully investigate how CTAB improves sludge dewaterability. Experimental results showed that capillary...

Principal-agent models are pervasive in theoretical and applied economics, but their analysis has largely been limited to the ``first-order approach'' (FOA) where incentive compatibility is replaced by a first-order condition. This paper presents a new approach to solving a wide class of...