An imitator—or a copycat—often enters a market to compete against an innovator. This article proposes a modeling approach that incorporates imitative entry in which an imitator produces a low end product that imitates a high-end product produced by the innovator. If no imitator enters the...

Firms often encourage and reward existing customers for bringing in new customers. In collaboration with a (top 500) Chinese firm, we conduct one randomized field experiment and find that, although a referral reward unequivocally enhances the existing customers’ incentives to refer new...

Firms often encourage existing customers to recruit new customers. In this paper, we analytically study the customer referrals in a two-period newsvendor model, where the demand generated by referrals increases in the previous sales. In this framework, we establish the structural results for the...

The suggested retail price (SRP) is widely applied in various industries and product categories in practice, and it can serve as a reference price, which impacts a consumer's utility through reference effect. In this paper, we study a firm's decisions of whether and how the firm should set an...