This paper explores future prospects of energy service companies (ESCOs) to deliver energy efficiency and other services in the context of fundamental changes occurring in the electricity industry. We briefly review the evolution of the U.S. ESCO industry, including an assessment of current market activity and capabilities, relationship to utilities and demand-side management (DSM) programs, an...

I ncreasing product variety through the use of alternate package sizes is a commonly observed mechanism in the grocery industry. Under such a scheme, however, the response to pricing decisions for each of the different package sizes is affected by how customers make demand choices. We build a demand model in which customers react smart to retail promotions through stockpiling and package size s...

We present the hospitality industry as a special retail environment that could have a great benefit from effective use of mobile technology. In this context, we discuss opportunities and challenges for the design of mobile hospitality applications. We illustrate these issues by presenting an example application that provides digital concierge services augmented with a social network to hotel gu...