The Internet has increased the flexibility of retailers, allowing them to operate an online arm in addition to their physical stores. The online channel offers potential benefits in selling to customer segments that value the convenience of online shopping, but it also raises new challenges....

Many consumer durable retailers often do not advertise their prices and instead ask consumers to call them for prices. It is easy to see that this practice increases the consumers' cost of learning the prices of products they are considering, yet firms commonly use such practices. Not...

I provide a general formulation of the channel pass-through problem as a comparative static of the retail price equilibrium, and I analyze the impact of category management and retail competition on pass-through, focusing on brand and retailer differences, and the nature of the cost change being...

Generally, profit predictions are made conditional upon a particular functional form. The typical caveat offered is that this is not the “true” demand model, but is instead some reasonable approximation. We show how the notion of an approximation can be explicitly represented using a random...

The growing dominance of large retailers has altered traditional channel incentives for manufacturers. In this paper, we present a theoretical model to illustrate a strategic manufacturer response to a dominant retailer. In our model, a dominant and a weak retailer compete for the sale of a...

We study the effects of retailer in-store media on distribution channel relationships. Retailers open in-store media (ISM) and allow manufacturers to advertise to shoppers. Our results suggest that ISM has an important role in coordinating a distribution channel on advertising volume and product...

This paper gives an example of renting the reputation of another agent to signal quality. We show that in a “maximally” separating equilibrium, manufacturers of high quality products distribute through retailers with strong reputation (reputable retailers), while manufacturers of low quality...

How can supermarkets use the vast data they have to design strategies to compete for large-basket shoppers, potentially their most profitable customers? We say, analyze the data to glean basket composition of heterogeneous consumers. Of theoretical and practical interest is the question, will...

A fundamental dilemma confronts retailers with stand-alone sites on the World Wide Web and those attempting to build electronic malls for delivery via the Internet, online services, or interactive television (Alba et al. 1997). For consumers, the main potential advantage of electronic shopping...

We propose a model that seeks the optimal timing and depth of retail discounts with the optimal timing and quantity of the retailer's order over multiple brands and time periods. The model is based on an integration of consumer decisions in purchase incidence, brand choice and quantity with the...