In this paper, we investigate the optimal selling scheme for a capacity-constrained seller who faces both aggregate demand and individual valuation uncertainties. As each consumer privately observes an initial estimate prior to the transactions and an updated information post-purchase, the problem exhibits the sequential screening feature and return policy emerges as part of the optimal selling...

The starting point for this study was the obvious " mis-match " between the dominating, consumer marketing-oriented way of approaching customer satisfaction on the one hand and our current understanding of industrial buyer–seller relationships and networks on the other. The purpose of this paper is to present a relational and contextual perspective on customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction i...

In this paper, we suggest using an English Auction Protocol for a procurement multi-attribute auction in which the item for sale is defined by several attributes, the buyer agent is the auctioneer, and the seller agents are the bidders. Such domains include auctions on task allocation, services, or compound products. At the beginning of the auction the buyer agent announces the required propert...

We examine the effect of relationship-specific investment on the use of detailed contracts using data on transactions from a survey of Romanian firms. In those transactions, seller relationship-specific investment increases the amount of contractual detail, while buyer relationship-specific investment decreases it. We interpret these results using a hostages model applied to cash-flow and credi...

When the quality of a good is at the discretion of the seller, how can buyers assure that the seller provides the mutually efficient level of quality? Contracts that provide a bonus to the seller if the quality is acceptable, or impose a penalty on the seller if quality is unacceptable, can in theory provide efficient incentives. But how are such contracts enforced? While the courts can be used...

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>This study considers a seller who sells single product to strategic consumers sensitive both price and quality over two periods: advance spot. Customers' valuations are uncertain in the first period revealed time. The seller's decisions include whether offer and, if so, of product, prices periods, ration capacity period. analysis is separated into cases: unlim...

Motivated by applications in the health insurance industry, we consider a seller who designs and sells a set of vertically differentiated products to a population of quality-sensitive customers. The seller’s business environment entails an uncertainty about production costs. We characterize the seller’s optimal price-quality schedule in the cases of: (a) static cost uncertainty, and (b) dynamic...

In this paper, we investigate the use of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to the problem of determining dynamic prices in an electronic retail market. As representative models, we consider a single seller market and a two seller market, and formulate the dynamic pricing problem in a setting that easily generalizes to markets with more than two sellers. We first formulate the single seller...

A much as 12% of the daily volume on the New York Stock Exchange, and similar volumes on other major world exchanges, involves sales by institutional investors to brokers through blind portfolio auctions. Such transactions typically take the form of a first-price sealed-bid auction in which the seller engages a few potential brokers and provides limited information about the portfolio being sol...

Flexible pricing plans are commonly observed in service industries. In this paper, we argue that the presence of flexible pricing plans can be attributed to consumers being boundedly rational – these consumers do not always select the best available option; rather, they select better options more often. In our model, the seller faces consumers who are heterogeneous in their degrees of intertemp...