When demand is volatile and uncertain, prices often cannot adequately respond to demand shifts because these shifts are not known when prices are set. In this dissertation, I use the hotel industry--- an industry with a high degree of demand uncertainty and capacity constraints, which amplify the cost of setting...
Consumers often base their decisions on impressions of the overall price level of a store. For example, decisions of where to shop, whether to buy an item or keep looking for a better price, and whether to buy a more or less expensive option can all be influenced by whether...
Firms are facing reputational crises with increasing regularity. Despite this, relatively little is known about what types of firm actions consumers will judge to be reprehensible, and how firms should respond once a reputational crisis has occurred. In this dissertation I focus on two specific topics related to firm reputational...
One of the main drivers of complexity in a service system is the dependence between different random variables describing the system. For example, the queue lengths at different time points and the waiting times of different items (jobs, customers) in queue are strongly dependent. To reduce dependence-related complexities, it is...