Marketers often stress the importance of treating customers as partners. A fundamental premise of this perspective is that all parties can be weakly better off if they work together to increase joint surplus and reach Pareto-efficient agreements. For marketing managers, this implies organizing marketing activities in a manner that maximizes total surplus. This logic is theoretically sound when ...

Bundle size pricing (BSP) is a multi-dimensional selling mechanism where the firm prices the size of the bundle rather than the different possible combinations of bundles. In BSP, the firm offers the customer a menu of different sizes and prices. The customer then chooses the size that maximizes his surplus and customizes his bundle given his chosen size. While BSP is commonly used across sever...

We consider a monopolist expert offering a service with a ‘credence’ characteristic. A credence service is one where the customer cannot verify, even after a purchase, whether the amount of prescribed service was appropriate or not; examples include legal, medical or consultancy services and car repair. This creates an incentive for the expert to ‘induce service’, that is, to provide unnecessar...

Procedures to divide a cake among n people with n-1 cuts (the minimum number) are analyzed and compared. For 2 persons, cut-and-choose, while envy-free and efficient, limits the cutter to exactly 50% if he or she is ignorant of the chooser’s preferences, whereas the chooser can generally obtain more. By comparison, a new 2person surplus procedure (SP’), which induces the players to be truthful ...

We derive bounds on the ratios of deadweight loss and consumer surplus to producer surplus under Cournot competition. To do so, we introduce a parameterization of the degree of curvature of market demand using the parallel concepts of ρ-concavity and ρ-convexity. The ”more concave” is demand, the larger the share of producer surplus in overall surplus, the smaller is consumer surplus relative t...

A number of products that display positive network effects are used in variable quantities by heterogeneous customers. Examples include corporate operating systems, infrastructure software, web services and networking equipment. In many of these contexts, the magnitude of network effects are influenced by gross consumption, rather than simply by user base. Moreover, the value an individual cust...

We look at one of the informational novelties introduced by the existence of internet market, namely "the recommender systems". A recommender system is a system employed by some internet sellers, which collects data from all previous customers about their experiences and makes inferences from this data to recommend a product to an active customer. The recommender system can also be interpreted ...

Combination vaccines have become the preferred choice for immunizing children in highand middle-income countries. However, these new vaccines are prohibitively expensive for lowincome countries, causing them to rely on older, less-expensive vaccines. This product divergence decreases economies of scale for the purchase of vaccines and eliminates the financial incentive for manufacturers to main...