Can managers' personality traits be of use to profit maximizing firm owners? We investigate the case where managers have a variety of attitudes toward relative performance that are indexed by their type. We consider two stage games where profit maximizing owners select managers in the first...

With increasing numbers of consumers in auction marketplaces, we highlight some recent approaches that bring additional economic, social, and psychological factors to bear on existing economic theory to better understand and explain consumers' behavior in auctions. We also highlight specific...

Firms can approach advertising competition either by setting advertising budgets (as in the percentage of sales method) or target sales levels (as in the objective and task approach). We study firms’ incentives to adopt one or the other posture using a two-stage model of duopolistic...

We propose a game-theoretical model of a retailer who sells a limited inventory of a product over a finite selling season by using one of two inventory display formats: display all (DA) and display one (DO). Under DA, the retailer displays all available units so that each arriving customer has...

In this paper, we develop a stylized partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) framework to study a dynamic pricing problem faced by sellers of fashion-like goods. We consider a retailer that plans to sell a given stock of items during a finite sales season. The objective of the...

We study the optimal pricing of a finite quantity of a fashion-like seasonal good in the presence of forward-looking (strategic) customers. We distinguish between two classes of pricing strategies: contingent and announced fixed-discount. In both cases, the seller acts as a Stackelberg leader...