Customer satisfaction incentive schemes are increasingly common in a variety of industries. We offer explanations as to how and when incenting employees on customer satisfaction is profitable and offer several recommendations for improving upon current practice. Faced with employee groups...

We propose and test new adaptive question design and estimation algorithms for partial profile conjoint analysis. Polyhedral question design focuses questions to reduce a feasible set of parameters as rapidly as possible. Analytic center estimation uses a centrality criterion based on...

We use a data set describing ownership of productive assets in the carpentry trade to evaluate several factors influencing the allocation of asset ownership between an employer and his employees. The findings suggest that the allocation involves a tradeoff between two incentive effects...

This note provides a formal proof that for the Defender model, with uniformly distributed tastes, the Nash price equilibria exist and, for a given set of positions, that they are unique. We also show that the profit function is well-behaved—continuous and quasi-concave—and that the maximum...

Managers often state that they are reluctant to vary prices for fear of "antagonizing customers." However, there is no empirical evidence that antagonizing customers through price adjustments reduces demand or profits. We use a 28-month randomized field experiment involving over 50,000 customers...

Deciding who should receive a mail-order catalog is among the most important decisions that mail-order-catalog firms must address. In practice, the current approach to the problem is invariably myopic: firms send catalogs to customers who they think are most likely to order from that catalog. In...