(This article originally appeared in Management Science, April 1997, Volume 43, Number 4, pp. 546--558, published by The Institute of Management Sciences.) Consider a series of companies in a supply chain, each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member. In this setting, inbound orders...

Manufacturers' returns policies are a common feature in the distribution of many products. The obvious rationale for returns policies is insurance. Practitioners, not surprisingly, have a different perspective and view returns as a cost of doing business. In this paper, we study the strategic...

Returns policies are common in many sectors of retail distribution. Padmanabhan and Png (1997) showed that with demand uncertainty, a returns policy could improve manufacturer profitability under certain conditions. Wang (2004) showed that returns policies do not change manufacturer...

Why is it that some products carry a minimal manufacturer base warranty even though all consumers are risk-averse? Conventional wisdom suggests that it is profitable for the manufacturer to offer a comprehensive warranty in this setting. We provide in this paper an explanation for the provision...

This paper characterizes the manufacturer warranty policy and its effect on consumer behavior under the following conditions: consumers are heterogeneous in risk-preferences, consumer actions affecting the probability of warranty redemption are unobservable to the manufacturer, and the product...

This paper advances the literature on multicategory demand models by simultaneously handling of the household. We propose a model of and outcomes in multiple categories. Our results show that cross-category promotional spillovers are asymmetric between the two product categories of bacon and...

Slotting allowances—lump sum transfers from manufacturers to retailers for carrying new products—have become an important part of promotional agreements over the past decade. Hardly known before the mid-1980s, they now represent a significant cost to launching a new entry in a wide range of...

The success of any user-generated content website depends crucially on its asset of content contributors. How firms should invest in the acquisition and retention of content contributors represents a novel question that is particularly important for these websites. We develop a vector...