When 25% Off Plus 20% off is Equal to 40% Off: Multiple-Discount Promotions are Preferred to Single-Discount Promotions

Discount Sensitivity – Are We All Equal?

The high adoption of smart mobile devices among consumers is an opportunity for ecommerce retailers to increase their sales by recommending consumers with real time, personalized coupons which take into account the specific contextual situation of the consumer [5]. While context-aware recommender systems (CARS) have been widely analyzed [1,2] personalized pricing or discount optimization in rec...

Public Sector Personnel Economics: Wages, Promotions, and the Competence-Control Trade-off

We model personnel policies in public agencies, examining how wages and promotion standards can partially offset a fundamental contracting problem: the inability of public sector workers to contract on performance, and the inability of political masters to contract on forbearance from meddling. Despite the dual contracting problem, properly constructed personnel policies can encourage intrinsic...

Snake oil salesmen or purveyors of knowledge: off-label promotions and the commercial speech doctrine.

The Second Circuit's December 2012 decision in United States v. Caronia striking down the prohibition on off-label marketing of pharmaceutical drugs has profound implications for economic regulation in general, calling into question the constitutionality of restrictions on the offer and sale of securities under the Securities Act of 1933, the solicitation of shareholder proxies and periodic rep...

Snake Oil Salesman or Purveyors of Knowledge: Off-Label Promotions and the Commercial Speech Doctrine

Consumer perceptions of ambiguous price promotions: scratch and save promotions versus tensile price claims

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how consumers respond differently to “scratch and save (SAS)” promotions versus “tensile price claims (TPC).” SAS promotions provide a possible discount (determined probabilistically) but conceal the exact amount until purchase. Tensile price claims (e.g. “up to 25 percent off on items marked with a red tag”) make imprecise price promotional cla...