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...

In modern businesses, firms face new challenges of managerial retention in capital budgeting process. We consider a model in which a manager privately observes the capital productivity of a project and has access to multiple outside financing options. We show that if the manager can obtain...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...