The marketing and operations management arms in a firm must work in coordination – marketing efforts to create demand go to waste if supply is suboptimal, and vice versa. However, achieving this coordination has remained a long-standing problem, because in most firms these units are managed in a decentralized manner. A major source of conflict is that marketing compensation is usually heavily w...

In the producer-seller relationship, the seller, besides his role of selling, is often in an ideal position to gather useful market information for the producer’s operations planning. Incentive alignment is critical to motivate both information-acquisition and sales efforts. Two popular contract forms are investigated. One is the forecast-based contract that requires the seller to submit a dema...

We provide the first test of the consequences of delegation in a mixed duopoly. Such delegation allows a profit maximizing private owner and a welfare maximizing public owner to give a separate weight to sales in managerial contracts. Theory predicts that such contracts improve welfare. Our experimental evidence indicates that both public and private owners do provide a weight on sales consiste...

We document some recent changes in the market for loan sales. We use a Tobit model to characterize the determinants of loan sales and purchases by banks, relating quantities bought and sold to bank size, capital, risk, and fbnding mode. The results, though not definitive, broadly confirm the Pennacchi model of sales. Other data cast doubt on the importance of mergers and acquisitions for this m...

We consider a supply chain where one manufacturer sells products to local markets through dealers. Each dealer faces a geographically dispersed market with uncertain demand, and is able to observe demand signal and exert effort to enhance sales. Both signal and effort affect the sales outcomes probabilistically, and cannot be observed by the manufacturer. Furthermore, dealers’ signals are corre...

Two powerful and related trends in the organization of U.S. farming are: production is shifting to larger family farms and agricultural contracts are increasingly being used to guide the production and marketing of farm commodities. These combined structural changes affect productivity and costs in agriculture and in the broader food sector, and also affect the financial returns to farmers, ben...