In an innovation contest, a firm (the seeker) facing an innovation-related problem (e.g., a technical R& D problem) posts this problem to a population of independent agents (the solvers) and then provides an award to the agent that generated the best solution. In this paper, we analyze the...

Consumers often know what kind of product they wish to purchase, but do not know which specific variant best fits their needs. As a result, a consumer may find an acceptable product in one retailer but nevertheless purchase nothing, opting to search other retailers for an even better product. We...

This paper studies a model in which consumers search among multiple competing firms for products that match their preferences at a reasonable price. We focus on how easier search, possibly due to the adoption of search-facilitating technologies such as the Internet, influences equilibrium...

In our prior work on product diffusions in presence of a capacity constraint, we postulated that a firm operating in such an environment should always attempt to fulfill as much of the present demand as is possible with the capacity constraint. In other words, the firm would never have demand...

We use hospital-level discharge data from cardiac patients in California to estimate the effects of focus on operational performance. We examine focus at three distinct levels of the organization--at the firm level, at the operating unit level, and at the process flow level. We find that focus...