When an incumbent faces a new entrant with superior capabilities, it may preemptively announce (preannounce) its future product to avoid forfeiting users. The traditional focus of preannouncement literature has been on truth-telling and vaporware. In the age of social media, the proliferation of online discussion forums and social network usage leads to the formation of public opinions (signals...

Consider a firm facing two consumer segments with differing valuations for quality. The demand is stationary and known, and consumers make repeat purchase. However, once a premium product is introduced, the valuations of the consumers change in the next period. The firm derives a cost savings due to learning effect in the second period, the magnitude of which depends on the volume in the first ...

These notes arose from my Cambridge Part III course on Additive Combinatorics, given in Lent Term 2009. The aim was to understand the simplest proof of the Bourgain-Glibichuk-Konyagin bounds for exponential sums over subgroups. As a byproduct one obtains a clean proof of the Bourgain-Katz-Tao theorem on the sumproduct phenomenon in Fp. The arguments are essentially extracted from Bourgain’s pap...

The development andwidespread use, in the United States and globally, of safe and effective vaccines has been one of the greatest achievements in science, medicine, and public health—saving lives, preventing disabilities, contributing to improvements in life expectancy, and reducing health care costs. Serious and once common childhood infections are increasingly joining the ranks of “vaccine-pr...

Rapid technological innovation and changing market expectations in electronic commerce are pushing companies to develop strategies for radically new products. Fast and unbiased new marketing research methods are needed to reduce the associated risks. A full-revelation mechanism is a crucial element of these new methods. It can be implemented with a two-round, second-price, sealed-bid auction. T...

We study a rental system where a fixed number of heterogeneous users rent one product at a time from a collection of reusable products. The online DVD rental firm Netflix provides the motivation. We assume that rental durations of each user are independent and identically distributed with finite mean. We study transient behavior in this system following the introduction of a new product that is...

This paper presents a model of the introduction of a product line that consists of a high-end model and a low-end model, under conditions of demand uncertainty. The firm is a-priori uncertain about the demand for the product line, which can turn out to be either high or low. The firm learns of the actual demand conditions only after at least one product in the line has been introduced. We start...

Globalized economy has led firms to introduce new innovations in the market quite frequently. Optimal Introduction time is an important strategic decision for firms because an early introduction may not take off as customers; channel members and other required partners might not be receptive enough, on the other hand too late an entry results in loss of opportunity for the firm. The decision is...

T paper investigates the impact of e-waste regulation on new product introduction in a stylized model of the electronics industry. Manufacturers choose the development time and expenditure for each new version of a durable product, which together determine its quality. Consumers purchase the new product and dispose of the last-generation product, which becomes e-waste. The price of a new produc...