We show that loyalty discounts create an externality among buyers even without economies of scale or downstream competition, and whether or not buyers make any commitment. Each buyer who signs a loyalty discount contract softens competition and raises prices for all buyers. We prove that, provided the entrant’s cost advantage is not too large, with enough buyers, this externality implies that i...

We study a microprocessor company selling short-life-cycle products to a set of buyers that includes large consumer electronic goods manufacturers. The seller has a limited capacity for each product and negotiates with each buyer for the price. Our analysis of their sales data reveals that larger purchases do not always result in bigger discounts. While existing theories cannot explain this non...

A single unit of a good is to be sold by auction to one of many potential buyers. There are two equally likely states of the world. Potential buyers receive noisy signals of the state of the world. The accuracies of buyers ’ signals may differ. A buyer’s valuation is the sum of a common value component that depends on the state and an idiosyncratic private value component independent of the sta...

Compulsive hoarding is a common and often disabling neuropsychiatric disorder. This article reviews the phenomenology, etiology, neurobiology, and treatment of compulsive hoarding. Compulsive hoarding is part of a discrete clinical syndrome that includes difficulty discarding, urges to save, clutter, excessive acquisition, indecisiveness, perfectionism, procrastination, disorganization, and avo...

In the environment of business‐to‐business e‐commerce, Buyers and sellers in mature industrial markets can turn single transactions into long-term beneficial relationships by a deeper understanding of the complex connection between the two and buyers and sellers are uncertain about their roles. A “must-do” for the sellers, in particular, is to understand patterns of investment and reward,...

Introduction Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a clinical syndrome whose hallmarks are excessive, anxiety-evoking thoughts and compulsive behaviours that generally recognized as unreasonable, but which cause significant distress impairment. OCD may also occur in the context of other neuropsychiatric disorders, most commonly anxiety mood disorders. The question remains to whether these comb...

Abstract Prior studies show that coordinating supply chain inventories with common replenishment epochs (CRE) provides benefit for vendor and buyers. Coordination using selective discount (SD) strategy allows some buyers to participate in the coordination scheme while other buyers continue to order as earlier. This can reduce the vendor’s total cost more than that of all buyers participating an...

This paper studies price dynamics in a setting in which a monopolist sells a new experience good over time to many buyers, and the seller can neither price discriminate among the buyers nor commit to a price rule. Buyers learn from their own experiences about the effectiveness of the product. Individual learning generates ex post heterogeneity, which affects the buyers’ purchasing decisions, th...

In the context of electronic commerce, when modeling the trustworthiness of selling agent relies (in part) on propagating ratings provided by buying agents that have personal experience with the seller, the problem of unfair ratings arises. Extreme diversity of open and dynamic electronic marketplaces causes difficulties in handling unfair ratings in trust management systems. To ease this probl...