(1) Problem definition: We study a special form of group buying: the group buying succeeds only if the number of sign-ups reaches a preset threshold, with no duration constraint. Customers with heterogeneous valuations arrive sequentially and decide between signing up for the group buying or...

Does the social comparison still intensify the competition among sellers in volatile markets? In this paper, we study the price competition in markets with volatile sizes and, importantly, with sellers that socially compare their profits with each other ex post for any realization of market...

Problem definition: The undesirable but inevitable consequence of running promotions is that consumers can be trained to time their purchases strategically. In this paper, we study randomized promotions, where the firm randomly offers discounts over time, as an alternative strategy of...

This paper studies two types of threshold-induced effects: a surge of new sign-ups around the time when the thresholds of group-buying deals are reached, and a stronger positive relation between the number of new sign-ups and the cumulative number of sign-ups before the thresholds are reached...

Motivated by the supermarket practice of marking down perishable products daily, we study a newsvendor who sells a perishable asset over repeated periods to consumers with a given consumption valuation for the product. The market size in each period is random, following a stationary...