We study the impact of service attributes (warranty length, after-sales service quality) on consumer demand in the U.S. automobile industry, examining the presence of complementarities/substitution between service attributes and product quality. Our results estimate a median willingness to pay...

Traditional sourcing arrangements for after-sales product support have centered around physical assets. Typically, a customer would pay the supplier of maintenance services in proportion to the resources used, such as spare parts, that are needed to maintain the product. In recent years, we have...

Using a proprietary dataset provided by a major manufacturer of aircraft engines, we empirically investigate how product reliability is impacted by use of two different types of after-sales maintenance support contracts: time and material contracts (T&MC) and performance-based contracts (PBC)....

Many consumers have learned to delay purchases, anticipating that prices might decrease. Such strategic or forward-looking behavior has attracted increasing attention from various disciplines, including operations management, information systems, marketing, and economics. However, there is...

The use of global suppliers has increased considerably over the last three decades. Operations management theory establishes that global sourcing requires more units of inventory, but since these units are often procured at a lower cost from global suppliers the capital invested in inventory and...

The transportation sector’s carbon footprint and dependence on oil are of deep concern to policy makers in many countries. Use of all-electric drive-trains is arguably the most realistic medium-term solution to address these concerns. However, motorist anxiety induced by an electric...

Competition has become an important theme in the operations management literature and, according to recent theoretical and empirical work, the key finding is that firms tend to overstock or overproduce under competition. Following this prediction, one would expect that, after airlines start a...

Product launch - an event when a new product debuts for production in a plant - is an important phase in product development. But launches disrupt manufacturing operations resulting in productivity losses. Using data from North-American automotive plants from years 1999-2007, we estimate that a...

We analyze the competitive capacity investment timing decisions of both established firms and start-ups entering new markets which are characterized by a high degree of demand uncertainty. Firms may invest in capacity early (when the market is highly uncertain) or late (when market uncertainty...

A systematic approach to innovating business models can help identify new business models that encourage sustainable use of products and services, or facilitate wider adoption of new environmentally friendly technologies. This article provides a brief summary of a conceptual framework (fully...