In numerous economic scenarios, contracting parties may not have a clear picture of all the relevant aspects. A contracting party may be unaware of what she and/or others are entitled to determine. Therefore, she may reject a contract that is too good to be true. Further, a contracting party may...

Recently, manufacturers have not only sold through retailers, but also started to directly access customers via online intermediaries by paying a proportional fee. This paper studies the incentive for the intermediaries' vertical demand information sharing with the manufacturers and retailers...

A central problem in vertical relationships is to minimize the mismatch between supply and demand. This paper studies a problem of contracting between a manufacturer and a retailer who privately observes the retail demand materialized after the contracting stage. Cash payments are bounded above...

In recent years, online retailers have not only acted as product resellers, a format commonly referred to as reselling; but also started to serve as online marketplaces for suppliers to directly access their customers and charge a proportion fee for providing this access, a format commonly...

Referral programs are widely adopted to expand the awareness of newly launched products and to boost their sales and profits. In these programs, customers, upon purchasing a product, are invited to refer their friends, and to stimulate their referral actions, firms promise them certain benefits...

Many companies are under pressure to improve pay transparency; however, its impact on their agents and principals remains unclear. As a way to investigate the upside and downside of pay transparency, we conduct a study that focuses on a scenario where agents have “cognitive bias” (namely,...

The retail e-commerce yields lucrative revenue in many industries. In this work, we provide a strategic perspective by investigating how consumer valuation, product quality, and manufacturers’ competition influence the choice of selling agreement using stylized models. The utility and...