Sales contests are short-term incentives used by managers to raise sales effort. The extant marketing theory predicts that the optimal prize structure should have two characteristics: 1) The number of prizewinners should be greater than one; and 2) prize values should be unique and rank-ordered....

We propose a behavioral theory to predict actual ordering behavior in multi-location inventory systems. The theory rests on a well-known stylized fact of human behavior: People's preferences are reference-dependent. We incorporate reference-dependence into the newsvendor framework by assuming...

When salespeople who are heterogeneous in abilities are assigned into teams, how do they adjust effort as the abilities of their coworkers change? Economic theory predicts that when salespeople compete with each other, the lower-ability salesperson strategically decreases effort as the ability...