We investigate the relationship between competition and firm specialization in the venture capital (VC) market. Staged financing motivates VC firms to fund entrepreneurs in various states of maturity: startup/seed, early, growth, and so forth, and leads to stage specialization. Contrary to the...

Online retailers can adopt generous return policies to entice customers to buy and try new products. In this paper we show how an online retailer can utilize product returns to segment customers based on their individual valuations of a product, and therefore to engage in profitable third-degree...