Traditional recommendation systems make recommendations based solely on the customer’s past purchases, product ratings and demographic data without considering the profitability the items being recommended. In this work we study the question of how a vendor can directly incorporate the profitability of items into its recommender so as to maximize its expected profit while still providing accura...

this paper addresses a new product positioning problem, in which prices of the products are simultaneously determined in order to maximize both customer satisfaction and seller’s net profit. in this regard, customer willingness is identified with respect to the products within a family, upon which prices of the products are optimized so as to attain two objective functions: 1) maximizing custom...

A fundamental aspect of any open payment system is the interchange fee that is paid from the merchant’s bank to the cardholder’s bank. Using a model in which there is partial participation by heterogeneous consumers and merchants, this paper characterizes the output maximizing, profit maximizing and welfare maximizing level of such an interchange fee. It examines how the optimal level of the fe...

This study examines the deliberations of professional MBA students when presented with a dilemma that weighs the difference between commitments to profit maximization against concerns for fired workers who would need to seek a new job during a recession. Using content analysis, we categorize accounting, economic and ethically-based rationales that differ from the profitmaximizing recommendation...