We study how a high quality service firm selects a service rate differently than a low quality service firm when the firm cannot communicate its service value or service rate to its customer base. As a result, potential customers may take the queue length upon arrival into account when assessing...

We study a single queue joining equilibrium when there is uncertainty in the consumers' minds about the service rate and value. Without such uncertainty, the joining equilibria are characterized by means of a single threshold queue length above which consumers do not join (Naor, 1969). We show...

In this paper, we study how rational agents infer the quality of a good (a product or a service) by observing the queue that is formed by other rational agents to obtain the good. Agents also observe privately the realization of a signal that is imperfectly correlated with the true quality of...

We consider a firm’s choice of service rate in the following environment. The firm may have high or low quality, and sells a good to consumers who are heterogeneously informed. Consumers arrive according to a Poisson process and are serviced in a random period of time. If a consumer arrives...

Cheap information technology has increased the availability of historical price information to strategic consumers in many environments. This information may impact the consumer's purchasing behavior. We study how a seller should react in such a scenario. We focus on a seller of a single asset...

We study observational learning in environments where customers choose among multiple options with uncertain quality for which they observe the aggregate choices of previous customers (the sales of each option). When customers have heterogeneous knowledge about quality, the choices of better...

Taking advantage of low foreign tax rates using transfer pricing and taking advantage of low production costs using offshoring are two strategies multinational firms (MNFs) use to increase their profits. We identify an important trade-off that MNFs face in setting their transfer prices: the...

In this paper, we study how two important determinants of recycling costs, economies of scale and material-stream homogeneity, influence endogenous recycling coalition formation. On one hand, strong economies of scale make the coalitions typically larger, due to fixed-cost savings. On the other...

We study the informational role stock-outs may play when consumers have heterogeneous information about the quality of a firm's product. Typically, in a newsvendor world, matching uncertain demand with inventory leads inevitably to stock-outs. When, in addition, consumers are heterogeneously...

Stock-outs convey information about the propensity of other consumers to purchase a product and this can increase the willingness of marginally interested consumers to buy. But in order to leverage stock-outs, firms must be able to capture the extra demand. We show how asymmetric inventory...