Inventory planning and coordination in disaster relief efforts

This research proposes a stochastic programming model to determine how supplies should be positioned and distributed among a network of cooperative warehouses. The model incorporates constraints that enforce equity in service while also considering traffic congestion resulting from possible evacuation behavior and time constraints for providing effective response. We make use of short-term information (e.g., hurricane forecasts) to more effectively preposition supplies in preparation for their distribution at an operational level. Through an extensive computational study, we characterize the conditions under which prepositioning is beneficial, as well as discuss the relationship between inventory placement, capacity and coordination within the network.     

The influence of job demands and resources on repatriate career satisfaction: A relative deprivation perspective

Drawing on Job Demands–Resources and relative deprivation theories, we develop a model of repatriate career satisfaction. We examine three job demands (psychological contract breach associated with pay, career derailment, and perceived underemployment) and suggest that each induces feelings of relative deprivation and thus is detrimental to repatriate career satisfaction. We further examine how two job resources, repatriates’ perceptions of how valuable their international assignment is to their careers and their beliefs about how it is valued by their organizations, moderate the job demands–career satisfaction relationships. Using a sample of 84 repatriates, we found some support for our integrated framework.     

Slotting Allowances and Scarce Shelf Space

Slotting allowances are payments made by manufacturers to obtain retail shelf space. They are widespread in the grocery industry and a concern to antitrust authorities. A popular view is that slotting allowances arise because there are more products than retailers can profitably carry given their shelf space. We show that the causality can also go the other way: the scarcity of shelf space may in part be due to the feasibility of slotting allowances. It follows that slotting allowances can be anticompetitive even if they have no effect on retail prices.     

Optimal low-price guarantees with anchoring

Many low-price guarantees are offered by small local firms who compete against much larger rivals. The prices of these larger rivals are often set nationally and thus are independent of local market conditions. Our objective in this paper is to explain why small firms in such environments might nevertheless adopt low-price guarantees. We characterize when offering a low-price guarantee is profitable, and assess which form it should take (i.e.,?conditional on offering a low-price guarantee, should the small firm offer to match or beat its larger competitor??s prices). We also assess the implications thereof (i.e., do the low-price guarantees benefit or harm the small firm??s customers).     

On the use of low-price guarantees to discourage price cutting

This paper formulates a novel test to assess whether, and to what extent, firms might be using low-price guarantees to discourage their rivals from cutting prices. The test is based on a comparison of paired observations of advertised prices that are set by competing firms at the same point in time on similar items, where one price is set by a firm that has a low-price guarantee and the other by a firm that does not have a low-price guarantee. Using data on retail tire prices, we find that the majority of paired observations involving firms that have price-matching guarantees are consistent with what one would expect if firms were using them to discourage price cutting, whereas the majority of paired observations involving firms that have price-beating guarantees are not. This suggests that price-matching and price-beating guarantees may be serving different purposes. The evidence also suggests that guarantees that apply to advertised prices only may be serving different purposes than guarantees that apply to both advertised and selling prices.     

Opportunism and menus of two-part tariffs

We show that a menu of two-part tariffs can solve the opportunism problem identified by McAfee and Schwartz (1994) [McAfee, R.P., Schwartz, M., 1994. Opportunism in multilateral vertical contracting: nondiscrimination, exclusivity, and uniformity. American Economic Review, 84 210–230] in vertical games with sequential contracting, provided the sunk costs incurred by the first firm to invest are not too large. If the seller were to engage in opportunism with a second firm in an attempt to shift rents from the first firm, the first firm could mitigate the dissipation of its rents by choosing from its menu of contract options the tariff with the higher marginal price and lower fixed fee. The prospect of the first firm's choosing the ‘wrong’ two-part tariff in the event of opportunism is, in some environments, sufficient to make opportunism unprofitable for the seller.     

Regulatory compliance with nonlinear penalties

Previous work has shown that, when firms choose only partial compliance with a regulatory standard, tightening the standard may drive firms' behavior in the wrong direction. This note explores the potential of nonlinear penalty functions to move behavior in the socially desired direction when standards are tightened without raising the total penalty.     

Market power and output stability

The conjectural variation elasticity is used in a comparative statics analysis to show that, contrary to a long-standing tenet of industrial organization, market power may destabilize output when cost and demand are stochastic, under other assumptions similar to those of recent empirical studies.     

A first-best regulatory tax for oligopoly

This paper addresses the question of how a regulator with imperfect knowledge of costs and demand can beneficially regulate the output levels of an industry characterized by some combination of externalities and market power. A two-part specific tax is derived which attains ex post optimality and is applicable to industries of arbitrary structure and conduct. The informational requirements for the solution are no more stringent than in previous two-part tax mechanisms in conjunction with the assumption of market equilibrium.