Retailers routinely allow consumers to negotiate a discount off the posted price, especially for big ticket items such as home appliances, furniture, automobiles, and real estate, as well as on online platforms such as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba. The profitability of such a strategy, relative to...

In many settings where pricing is delegated to salespeople, firms provide the salespeople incentives to not only sell more, but also to do so at higher prices. In this paper, we study the relative importance of pricing-focused and revenue-focused incentives, and quantify the profitability of...