Relationship marketing assumes that firms can be more profitable if they identify the most profitable customers and invest disproportionate marketing resources in them. While intuitive, such strategies presume that a firm can accurately predict the future profitability of customers. In particular, we argue that the feasibility of such strategies depends on the probabilities and costs of misclas...

In the last few decades, the effects of cooperative R&D arrangements on innovation and welfare have played an important role in policy making. Both the US and the EU have legislation in place providing for lenient antitrust treatment of such cooperative agreements. The goal of this paper is to analyze the effects of cooperative R&D arrangements in a model with a stochastic R&D process and outpu...

Title of dissertation: IS IT MORE PROFITABLE TO POST PRICES? – MARKET STRUCTURE WITH ENDOGENOUS SEARCH COSTS Binglin Gong Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor John Rust Department of Economics This dissertation contains three chapters. It analyzes a market where firms can choose whether or not to publicly post their prices. Price posting rewards a firm by reducing sear...

Many studies have agreed that innovation leads to product and process improvements, allows firms grow more quickly, be efficient, ultimately profitable than non-innovators. In this study, we explore the impact of (including innovation, organizational marketing innovation) on firms’ financial performance employees’ wages in Vietnamese agricultural firms. We take a survey from 257 Vietnam analyze...

Employing a dataset of 1,160 Indian firms, we study the impact global financing conditions on firms’ borrowings abroad across different phases credit. While abundant credit in post financial crisis period allowed firms to take advantage relatively cheap abroad, show that access external finance has declined since 2013. We find 2013, lenders are differentiating borrowers and it is specifically l...

This paper formalizes a non-cooperative explanation for pre-merger price increases. When consumers face switching costs, firms have strong incentives to offer bargain prices to lock in consumers whom they can exploit in the future. A future merger reduces a firm’s incentive to gain current market share, however, because the firm anticipates sharing future profits. Focusing on near-term profit, ...

The meteoric rise in the number of users on the Internet has led to a proliferation of web-based companies. While many of these companies have yet to be profitable, a miniscule few have been able to grow explosively while maintaining a positive revenue flow from the onset. By examining America Online, Yahoo and Amazon.com, this paper shows first how successful companies have been able to capita...

This paper solves merger formation problem in Cournot oligopolies by a cooperative and computational approach. In three-firm linear oligopolies, monopoly will be formed (or be stable) if its merging cost is sufficiently low and cost differentials are sufficiently large. When monopoly is unprofitable due to high merging costs, a profitable two-member merger will be formed if its efficient member...

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. We show experimentally that complementarities between high effort discretion, rent-sharing, screening opportunities, and competition are important driving forces behind these “high-performance work systems.” We document the endog...