Whether transported by air, sea, or land, perishable goods must reach their destinations on time. The sooner they arrive, the fresher they will be. But speed comes at a price. To keep shipping costs down while meeting customers’ diverse expectations of quality, most suppliers (“shippers”) today use multiple transportation service providers (“carriers”) for ... Read More

A wide variety of industries have production lines that produce multiple outputs at the same time. In some cases, these outputs serve different purposes, such as chemical processes, oil refining, and so on. Production outputs can also serve the same basic purpose, where quality levels may differ as a result of quantity being more important than quality ... Read More

Selling directly to customers represents an opportunity for suppliers, but it can threaten retailers’ profits. This is known as supplier encroachment, and it occurs across a range of industries. In an innovative study, HKUST’s Professor Ying-Ju Chen and co-researchers modeled scenarios in which retailers can optimize the outcomes of supplier encroachment ... Read More

Social interactions play a crucial role in the markets of social goods. This paper examines the optimal selling scheme when products show such social good feature. This paper examines a monopoly firm model adopting sequential launch strategy to sell social goods to a customer group in a network. Under this strategy, not only can the firm determine prices ... Read More

As unfairness in business transactions widely exists nowadays, consumers are increasingly worried about fairness. This kind of concern of fairness drives them to compare their payoffs with the sellers’ profits, and where a transaction is deemed inequitable, consumers may refuse to accept it. At the same time, such concern of price fairness also impacts a ... Read More

Supply chains are an integral part of business and form the network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute products to consumers. A supply chain also often contains various forms of information asymmetry (where one party has more information than the other) that drive business transactions. A manufacturer usually has less information ... Read More

The posterior price-matching is a mechanism where a firm reimburses the price difference to a customer who has purchased a product before a markdown. Thus, it is unlikely for a monopolist seller to mark down in a market where consumers are homogeneous (i.e., no room for price discrimination) and there is no inventory to reduce. The purpose of this paper is ... Read More

Agriculture—the science of cultivating soil, growing crops, and raising livestock—is the primary economic sector of many developing economies throughout the world. Within this context, farmer producer organisations (FPOs) aim to combat poverty by reducing inefficiencies in agricultural markets. For example, FPOs work closely with farmers to integrate ... Read More

One of the key aspects to running a business is having access to useful information. In developing countries, farmers often suffer from a lack of information, which can lead to missing out on opportunities to sell their products at a higher price. By using various information and communication technologies, governments, non-governmental organizations, and ... Read More

Display ads generate about US$25 billion a year through sales of “impressions” – a pair of eyeballs on an online advertisement that can be a banner, video or non-text-based promotion. But these impressions are unpredictable, change over time and cannot be stored. So how can publishers maximise their profits? Ying-Ju Chen investigates the issue and proposes a ... Read More