Brand and Product Management

Delegation is a central feature of organizational design that theory suggests should be aligned with the intensity of incentives. We explore a specific form of delegation, namely price delegation, whereby firms allow sales people to offer a maximum discount from the list price to their customers. We develop a model of the price delegation decision based on information acquisition that relies on characteristics of our empirical context of industrial sales.

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent upwards of $18 billion on marketing drugs in 2007. Detailing and drug sampling activities account for the bulk of this spending. To stay competitive, pharmaceutical managers need to maximize the return on these marketing investments by determining which physicians to target, when, and how to target them. In this paper, we present a two-stage approach for dynamically allocating detailing and sampling activities across physicians to maximize long-run profitability.

This research examines the relationship between desire for control and acceptance of new products. We hypothesize that desire for control — the need to personally control outcomes in one's life — acts as a barrier to new product acceptance. Three experiments provide support for this hypothesis. This effect holds when desire for control is high as a dispositional trait (Studies 1 and 3) and when it is situationally induced (Study 2). We also identify an intervention to increase new product acceptance based on the idea that new products threaten one's sense of control.

Consumers frequently evaluate their own traits before making consumption decisions (e.g., am I thin enough for skinny jeans?). The outcome of these self-evaluations depends on the standard consumers use and on whether they evaluate self in assimilation or contrast to that standard. Previous self-judgment research has focused on self-standards that arise from social aspects of the environment, including people and groups.

In recent years, online retailers (also called e-tailers) have started allowing manufacturers direct access to their customers while charging a fee for providing this access, a format commonly referred to as agency selling. In this paper, we use a stylized theoretical model to answer a key question that e-tailers are facing: When should they use an agency selling format instead of using the more conventional reselling format?

I view the research articles presented here as prototypical examples of what may be called “the new wave” in studying Asian markets and consumers. This emerging “new wave” has a different focus than research done over the last few decades. Research is shifting from an emphasis on traditional Asian culture toward a focus on consumer culture and how this consumer culture manifests itself in various Asian markets. The “new wave” research also focuses less on general concepts and more on uniquely Asian phenomena. Finally, methodologically research is shifting from “East” vs.

We conduct a randomized control trial that generates exogenous variation in the access to foreign markets for rug producers in Egypt. Using this methodology and detailed survey data, we causally identify the impact of exporting on firm performance. Treatment firms report 15–25 percent higher profits and exhibit large improvements in quality alongside reductions in quantity-based productivity relative to control firms. These findings do not simply reflect firms being offered higher margins to manufacture high-quality products that take longer to produce.

We examine the relationship between the organization of a multi-divisional firm and its ability to adapt production decisions to changes in the environment. We show that even if lower-level managers have superior information about local conditions, and incentive conflicts are negligible, a centralized organization can be better at adapting to local information than a decentralized one. As a result, and in contrast to what is commonly argued, an increase in product market competition that makes adaptation more important can favor centralization rather than decentralization.

Participants in matching markets face search and screening costs which prevent the market from clearing efficiently. In many settings, the rise of online matching platforms has dramatically reduced the cost of finding and contacting potential partners. While one might expect both sides of the market to benefit from reduced search costs, this is far from guaranteed. In particular, this change may force participants to screen more potential partners before finding one who is willing to accept their offer.