Knowledge that Transforms

We study the effects of price matching in a setting in which each firm selects both its price and output, simultaneously. We show that the availability of a price-matching option leads to the Cournot outcome in this setting. Our experimental study confirms this result in the laboratory. Our finding is a stark contrast to the one obtained in the standard price competition that the most likely market price in the presence of a price-matching option is the monopolistic price. In addition, we show that price matching benefits consumers in markets with a large number of firms. If a market has a few firms, then the effects of price matching on consumers depend on the market demand and cost functions. Thus, our study suggests that the effect of price matching depends on the strategic variables of the firms. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2788 .

We model a corporate board evaluating a chief executive officer (CEO) of uncertain management ability. Each director receives a noisy private signal about CEO ability, after which directors discuss this ability and vote to retain or replace the CEO. Directors care about true CEO ability, since it affects their equity holding values; however, a CEO may impose costs of dissent on a director who votes to fire but fails to oust her. We relate the equilibrium CEO firing decision to board size, board composition, the effect of an imprecise public signal, and the cost and probability of finding a good replacement CEO. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2762 .

The business model of low-cost carriers is now well established and accounts for a large share of Western civil aviation, particularly in Europe. To understand why it has proven so successful, we develop a theoretical model that exploits the two-sided nature of flights as connectors of supply and demand for goods and services other than traveling itself across physical space. Carriers offer flights of different quality and may sign agreements with suppliers of goods and services at the destination so as to subsidize and foster demand from the carriers’ travelers as in standard two-sided markets. Customers/travelers care about home and destination consumption and about the flight’s quality. Hence, beyond the thickness of the connected sides of the market, the quality of the airline platform has an intrinsic value to travelers. We show that only low-income travelers fly with low-cost airlines, while no-frills carriers are more likely to act as a platform than legacy airlines. We study how the degree of substitution between home and destination consumption affects the equilibrium market structure of the airline industry.

Unimodal intertemporal decisions involve comparing options of the same type (e.g., apples now versus apples later), and cross-modal decisions involve comparing options of different types (e.g., a car now versus a vacation later). As we show, existing models of intertemporal choice do not allow time preference to depend on whether the comparisons to be made are unimodal or cross-modal. We test this restriction in an experiment using the delayed compensation method, a new extension of the standard method of eliciting intertemporal preferences that allows for assessment of time preference for nonmonetary and discrete outcomes, as well as for both cross-modal and unimodal comparisons. Participants were much more averse to delay for unimodal than cross-modal decisions. We provide two potential explanations for this effect: one drawing on multiattribute choice, the other drawing on construal-level theory. Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2613 .

Consumer boycotts are triggered by egregious events, but the literature has not distinguished the level of egregiousness from consumers’ preferences or disutility associated with a given level of egregiousness, nor has the literature studied how these two components of egregiousness affect boycott intensity. We provide a model of market-level boycotts that distinguishes the two egregiousness components. Consistent with the predictions of our model, the market-level intensity of consumer boycotting of BP-branded gasoline, which was triggered by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, increased with the spill’s egregiousness level, approximated by the officially reported daily amount of oil leaked into the ocean and by other measures (i.e., the duration of the spill and the intensity of media coverage), and with consumers’ disutility from egregiousness, approximated by an area’s environmentalism and its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico.

This paper develops and estimates an economic model of the costs and beliefs required to rationalize household direct stock ownership. In the model, investors believe they can learn information about individual stock returns through costly research. The model identifies the distributions of both research costs and beliefs about the predictability of individual stock returns. Identification depends only on households’ wealth and portfolio choices. The model also provides a novel explanation for many empirical features of household portfolios. Parameter estimates suggest that most households have modest beliefs about the benefits of individual stock research, although a minority must expect extraordinary returns. Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2791 .

Over the past 10 years, many healthcare organizations have made significant investments in automating their clinical operations, mostly through the introduction of advanced information systems. Yet the impact of these investments on staffing is still not well understood. In this paper, we study the effect of information technology (IT)-enabled automation on staffing decisions in healthcare facilities. Using unique nursing home IT data from 2006 to 2012, we find that the licensed nurse staffing level decreases by 5.8% in high-end nursing homes but increases by 7.6% in low-end homes after the adoption of automation technology. Our research explains this by analyzing the interplay of two competing effects of automation: the substitution of technology for labor and the leveraging of complementarity between technology and labor. We also find that increased automation improves the ratings on clinical quality by 6.9% and decreases admissions of less profitable residents by 14.7% on average. These observations are consistent with the predictions of an analytical staffing model that incorporates technology adoption and vertical differentiation. Overall, these findings suggest that the impact of automation technology on staffing decisions depends crucially on a facility’s vertical position in the local marketplace. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2695 .

Consumers search for product information to resolve valuation uncertainties before purchase. We incorporate search cost into consumer choice models and study the two-stage consider-then-choose policy. In the first stage, a consumer forms her consideration set by balancing utility uncertainty and search cost. In the second stage, she evaluates all products in her consideration set and chooses the one with the highest net utility. We show that the revenue-ordered assortment (i.e., the offer set that includes products in the revenue-decreasing order) fails to be optimal, although it can obtain at least half the optimal revenue. We propose a k-quasi-attractiveness-ordered assortment and show that it can be arbitrarily near optimal for the market share maximization problem. The assortment problems with search cost are generally NP-hard, so we develop efficient approximation or relatively fast exact algorithms for a variety of assortment problems under the consider-then-choose models with search cost. For the joint assortment planning and pricing problem with homogeneous consumers, we show that the intrinsic-utility-ordered assortment and the quasi-same-price policy, which charges the same price for all products except at most one, are optimal. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2790 .