The Robinson-Patman Act (RP), an antitrust statute aimed at protecting small businesses, limits price setting in distribution channels. To avoid costly penalties under RP, managers take a variety of precautions when pricing to retailers and wholesalers. But how likely is a court to find a...

This paper investigates the diverging incentives for product quality in a channel with two asymmetric retailers and a common supplier. When retailers differ in terms of service provision and channel power, changes in manufactured quality cause channel conflicts. In particular, our results show...

Retailers and their suppliers often exchange demand information, which is believed to benefit both firms and consumers. We show how such information exchange can benefit only the upstream supplier at the expense of the downstream retailer and consumers.

The growing dominance of large retailers has altered traditional channel incentives for manufacturers. In this paper, we present a theoretical model to illustrate a strategic manufacturer response to a dominant retailer. In our model, a dominant and a weak retailer compete for the sale of a...

In certain product categories, large discount retailers are known to offer shallower assortments than traditional retailers. In this paper, we investigate the competitive incentives for such assortment decisions and the implications for manufacturers' distribution strategies. Our results show...

Co-branding is often used by companies to reinforce the image of their brands. In this paper, we investigate the conditions under which a brand's image is reinforced or impaired as a result of co-branding, and the characteristics of a good partner for a firm considering co-branding for image...

While retailers have sales data to forecast demand, manufacturers have a broad understanding of the market and the coming trends. It is well known that pooling such demand information within a distribution channel improves supply chain logistics. However, little is known about how...