Delegating pricing decisions to the salesforce has been a salient issue for marketing academics and practitioners. We examine this issue in a competitive market using standard agency theory with symmetric and asymmetric information. Under symmetric information we find that the optimal contracts...

Sales contests are commonly used by firms as a short-term motivational device to increase salespeople's efforts. Conceptually, sales contests and piece-rate schemes, such as salary, commission, or quotas, differ in that in sales contests payment to salespeople is based on relative rather than...

A theory of salesforce compensation plans is presented where the sales of a product depend not only on the salesperson's effort but also on the uncertainty in the selling environment. The firm chooses a compensation plan to maximize its profit taking into account the salesperson's likely effort...

When is inducing intrabrand competition (via nonexclusive distribution) an optimal strategy? To address this issue, a static model is developed to examine two settings. The manufacturer uses exclusive distributors in the first setting and nonexclusive distributors in the second. The analysis...

Side payments, known politely as gainsharing and pejoratively as bribery, are prevalent in marketing. Indeed, many management schools have added ethics modules to their basic marketing courses to discuss these issues and there is much discussion of side payments in the literature (e.g., Adams...

Idea generation (ideation) is critical to the design and marketing of new products, to marketing strategy, and to the creation of effective advertising copy. However, there has been relatively little formal research on the underlying incentives with which to encourage participants to focus their...

Academic work on sales compensation plans features agency models prominently, and these models have also been used to build decision aids for managers. However, empirical support remains sketchy. We conducted three experiments to investigate three unresolved predictions involving the...

An outstanding problem in marketing is why some firms in a competitive market delegate pricing decisions to agents and other firms do not. This paper analyzes the impact of competition on the delegation decision and, in turn, the impact of delegation on prices and incentives. The theory builds...

Existing institutions of banking regulation force banks to meet minimum capital adequacy ratios. These regulations intend to guarantee the solvency of banks and to protect depositors against excessive risk-taking by bank-owners. By the same token, however, they may have consequences for...

We examine the implementation of efficient decisions about accepting a special order with asymmetric information by means of a dual transfer pricing mechanism based on Ronen and McKinney (1970). The model is designed in a simple fashion, two vertically related divisions within a firm...