Brand and Product Management

A recent development in online advertising has been the ability of advertisers to have their ads displayed exclusively on (a part of) a web page. We study this phenomenon in the context of both sponsored search advertising and display advertising. Ads are sold through auctions, and when exclusivity is allowed, the seller accepts two bids from advertisers, where one bid is for the standard display format in which multiple advertisers are displayed, and the other bid is for being shown exclusively (therefore they are called two-dimensional, or 2D, auctions).

Geographic price discrimination is generally considered beneficial to firm profitability. Firms can extract higher rents by varying prices across markets to match consumers' preferences. This paper empirically demonstrates, however, that a firm may instead prefer a national pricing policy that fixes prices across geographic markets, foregoing the opportunity to customize prices. Under appropriate conditions, a national pricing policy helps avoid intense local competition due to targeted prices.

Two-sided matching platforms, such as those for labor, accommodation, dating, and taxi hailing, can control and optimize over many aspects of the search for partners. To understand how the search for partners should be designed, we consider a dynamic model of search by strategic agents with costly discovery of pair-specific match value. We find that in many settings, the platform can mitigate wasteful competition in partner search via restricting what agents can see/do.

We consider the problem faced by a service platform that needs to match supply with demand, but also to learn attributes of new arrivals in order to match them better in the future. We introduce a benchmark model with heterogeneous workers and jobs that arrive over time. Job types are known to the platform, but worker types are unknown and must be learned by observing match outcomes. Workers depart after performing a certain number of jobs. The payoff from a match depends on the pair of types and the goal is to maximize the steady-state rate of accumulation of payoff.

We examine the mirror image of sustained competitive advantage, namely, sustainable competitive disadvantage. We begin by reviewing the theoretical and empirical literature on sustained competitive advantage. Our review suggests it's not just firms in superior positions that sustain their performance, but also firms in the remainder of the performance spectrum, including those occupying positions around and below the norm.

In many industries, product design and manufacturing lead times are sufficiently long that both the quality level of a product and the amount of inventory produced must be determined before a firm knows what the actual demand will be. In this paper, we conduct a theoretical analysis of such a setting. We first consider a centralized channel and characterize the optimal decisions by establishing relationships that must hold between the elasticity of cost of quality and the elasticity of revenue and show that quality and inventory are strategic substitutes.

Ethics in business is a major topic both in the social sciences and in business itself. Anthropologists, long attendant to the intersection of ethics and practice, are particularly well suited to offer vital insights on the subject. This timely collection considers a range of ethical issues in business through the examination of anthropologically informed theory and case examples.

This paper studies technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producers in Sialkot, Pakistan. We invented a new cutting technology that reduces waste of the primary raw material and gave the technology to a random subset of producers. Despite the clear net benefits for nearly all firms, after 15 months take-up remained puzzlingly low.