Organizations increasingly seek solutions to their open-ended design problems by employing a contest approach in which search over a solution space is delegated to outside agents. We study this new class of problems, which are costly to specify, pose credibility issues for the focal firm, and...

Firms in a variety of industries offer addon products to consumers who have previously purchased a base-product. We posit that consumers, in making their decision whether to purchase an addon that complements the base-product, find a greater need for the value offered by the addon when the...

The concept of tradeoffs, and how one may manage them, is one of the core issues addressed in much of operations literature. While much work has gone into answering how one should manage tradeoffs, there is significantly less understanding of how people actually manage them. Toward developing a...

Innovation contests within firms offer the potential to tap latent employee expertise across the organization, and expand innovation beyond the core R&D teams. Still, firms undertaking an internal contest, unlike the more commonly studied external contests, incur significant opportunity costs...

In any pool of ideas, it is often the case that a small fraction of top ideas have significantly higher quality, both in absolute terms and relative to other ideas in the pool. This study formulates a model of idea pools, and examines the impact of the “structure” of idea pools on the extent...

In many industries, consumers who purchase services pay a fixed upfront fee for access, and then consume that service over a period of time. In this paper, we examine the implications of this temporal separation of purchase and consumption on a user's consumption choices, and on the firm's...