Firms in several markets try to attract consumers by offering discounts in other unrelated markets. This promotion strategy, which we call "cross-market discounts," has been successfully adopted in the last few years by many grocery retailers in partnership with gasoline retailers across North...

In this paper, we investigate how retailer competition and asymmetry affect store brand strategy when some of the consumers are one-stop shoppers. We find that when the intensity of competition between retailers is low, store brands can be used to shield consumers loyal to the national brand...

We study multi-period sales-force incentive contracting where salespeople can engage in effort gaming, a phenomenon that has extensive empirical support. Focusing on a repeated moral hazard scenario with two independent periods and a risk-neutral agent with limited liability, we conduct a...

E-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Alibaba and Flipkart, that match sellers and consumers at an unprecedented scale, operate their internal search engines to help buyers find relevant products from a large number of sellers, and also allow sellers to advertise to consumers for positions in...

We study how a consumer optimally allocates attention to favorable and unfavorable information related to a product before purchasing it, when information processing is costly. We find that attention allocation depends on the consumer's prior belief about whether the product matches her needs or...

Advertising to a consumer moves her further along the purchase journey, and tracking the consumer's online activities enables the advertiser to infer her purchase journey stage and target her accordingly. However, many consumers dislike being tracked, and repeated advertising leads to ad...

Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This paper explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking and ad fraud. These topics are not unique to...

In today's online environment, consumers and sellers interact through multiple channels such as email, search engines, banner ads, affiliate websites and comparison-shopping websites. In this paper, we investigate whether knowing what channels a consumer used on their path until a point of time...

We consider the compensation design problem of a firm that hires a salesperson to exert effort to increase demand. We assume both demand and supply to be uncertain, with sales being the smaller of demand and supply, and assume that if demand exceeds supply then unmet demand is unobservable...

Advertising on e-commerce marketplaces, wherein sponsored product listings are interleaved with organic product listings, is a large and growing phenomenon. In this paper, we both theoretically and empirically study whether including sponsored listings improves or hurts the overall quality and...