The authors study the takeoff of 16 new products across 31 countries (430 categories) to analyze how and why takeoff varies across products and countries. They test the effect of 12 hypothesized drivers of takeoff using a parametric hazard model. The authors find that the average time to takeoff...

This paper employs a real options approach to analyze optimal investment decisions. When investment projects have the characteristics of irreversibility, uncertainty and the option to wait or exit, the traditional net present value (NPV) method would underestimate the value of investment, since...

Many purchases of differentiated goods are repeated, giving sellers the opportunity to engage in price discrimination based upon the shopper's previous behavior by either offering loyalty discounts to repeat buyers or introductory rates to new customers. Recent theoretical work suggests that...

The goal of this paper is to study the frequency of new product introductions in monopoly markets where demand is subject to transitory saturation. We focus on those types of goods for which consumers purchase at most one unit of each variety, but repeat purchases in the same product category....

Consumption of certain commodities produces transitory saturation, in the sense that potential instantaneous utility for an additional unit is very low immediately after a consumption episode, but increases over time. Such cyclical patterns of preferences have important implications for monopoly...

Many economists and policy analysts seem to believe that loyalty-rewarding pricing schemes, like frequent flyer programs, tend to reinforce firms' market power and hence are detrimental to consumer welfare. The existing academic literature has supported this view to some extent. In contrast, we...