The American electric power industry is undergoing dramatic changes in the way it is structured and regulated. As of September of 1998, state utility regulators, state legislatures or both in 18 states had made the decision to implement retail competition within 5 years or less. Competition in electricity markets and associated new opportunities for expanded inter-regional electricity trading c...

This paper studies the effects of customer heterogeneity and strategic behavior on dynamic pricing strategies. We assume that heterogenous customers arrive during a fixed season according to a Poisson process with intensity as a function of price. We obtain an implicit optimal pricing policy by solving a HJB equation. Our results show that optimal prices follow a submartingale (supermartingale)...

The marketing literature has long acknowledged the importance of a customer’s lifetime value in customer relationship management. More recently, researchers have turned their attention to the links between satisfaction and both customer acquisition and retention strategies. In this paper, we study how to best communicate with a database of customers, taking into account that customers are able ...

The marketing literature has long acknowledged the importance of a customer’s lifetime value in customer relationship management. More recently, researchers have turned their attention to the links between satisfaction and both customer acquisition and retention strategies. In this paper, we study how to best communicate with a database of customers, taking into account that customers are able ...

This study investigates the association between customer satisfaction and willingness-to-pay or price tolerance, The goal is not only to determine whether the association between customer satisfaction and price tolerance is positive or negative but also to gauge the degree of association. The Swedish Customer Satisfaction Barometer provides the data. The empirical analysis indicates a negative ...

There is an increasing surplus of tomatoes that are abandoned due to their failure to meet customer standards. Therefore, to allow both value additions and the effective reuse of surplus tomatoes, we developed tomato vinegar (TV) containing phytochemicals and evaluated its anti-obesity effects in vitro and in vivo. TV inhibited adipocyte differentiation of 3T3-L1 preadipocyte and lipid accumula...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of management’s strategic choice of asset and liability composition in life insurance on shortfall risk and the shareholders’ fair risk charge. In contrast to previous work, we focus on the effectiveness of management decisions regarding the product mix and the riskiness of the asset side under different surplus appropriation schemes.We propose amo...

Understanding the process of software adoption is of paramount importance to software start-ups. We study a monopolistic seller’s optimal seeding, sequencing, and pricing strategies under network effects. We demonstrate the importance of adoption sequencing as well as controllability over the seeding process to seller’s profit, consumer surplus, and social welfare. Under multi-pricing, full inf...

Financial institutions are financed by both investors and customers. Investors expect an appropriate risk-adjusted return for providing financing and risk bearing. Customers, in contrast, provide financing in exchange for specific services, and want the service fulfillment to be free of the intermediary’s credit risk. We develop a framework that defines the roles of customers and investors in i...