Motivated by the growing significance of contingent free shipping (CFS) policies in the e-commerce industry, we investigate the optimal CFS and pricing decisions for online retailers. Under a CFS policy, consumers enjoy free shipping for orders exceeding a certain threshold value; otherwise, they...

In the service industry, a service provider may sell a collection of service activities as a package, also known as a service bundle. Empirical studies indicate that the customer's ex-post perception of a service bundle depends on not only the utility of each activity but also the sequence of...

Principal-agent models are pervasive in theoretical and applied economics, but their analysis has largely been limited to the ``first-order approach'' (FOA) where incentive compatibility is replaced by a first-order condition. This paper presents a new approach to solving a wide class of...