It is well established that returns to spending on research and development are positive and accrue over several years — that is, firms benefit from higher levels of cumulative R&D spending. We study how a given amount of such spending is best allocated, over time, to optimize R&D performance....

This paper compares the financial and environmental performance of two revenue models for the online retailing of groceries: the per-order model, where customers pay for each delivery; and the subscription model, where customers pay a set fee and receive free deliveries. We build a stylized...

Understanding the value of a product development project is central to a firm’s choice of project portfolio. The value of a project to a firm depends not only on the project’s properties but also on the other projects being developed by the firm. This is due to interactions with other...

We study customer preference for the bike share system in the city of London. We estimate a structural demand model on the station network to learn the preference parameters and use the estimated model to provide insights on the design and expansion of the bike share system. We highlight the...

The marketing and operations management arms in a firm must work in coordination – marketing efforts to create demand go to waste if supply is suboptimal, and vice versa. However, achieving this coordination has remained a long-standing problem, because in most firms these units are managed in...

Over the past few years, firms in the travel and entertainment industries have begun using novel sales strategies for revenue management. In this chapter, we study a selling strategy called opaque selling, in which firms guarantee one of several fully specified products, but hide the identity of...

During development of an innovative product there is often considerable uncertainty about component production cost, and it is of interest for both the manufacturer and the supplier to engage in a collaborative effort to reduce this uncertainty and lower the expected cost. Despite the obvious...

Using a proprietary data set provided by a major manufacturer of aircraft engines, we empirically investigate how product reliability is impacted by the use of two different types of after-sales maintenance support contracts: time and material contracts (T&MC) and performance-based contracts...