In recent years, online retailers (e-tailers) have started allowing manufacturers direct access to their customers while charging a fee for providing this access, a format commonly referred to as agency selling. In this paper, we use a stylized theoretical model to answer a key question that...

The majority of theoretical vertical differentiation models in the literature derive equilibrium prices that exhibit what we call an “adverse price effect:” for a low quality firm, the equilibrium price may decrease when the product quality increases. This seemingly counterintuitive...

The Internet has changed the nature of doing business as well as the nature of competition in many industries. Consumers are more empowered than ever with valuable information such as prices, products, and store ratings. Because of this, some researchers even predicted, during the early stage of...