We study the effect of strategic customer behavior on pricing and rationing decisions of a firm selling a single product over two periods. The seller may limit the availability of the product (that is, ration) in the second (clearance) period. Some customers are strategic and respond to the firm's decisions by timing their purchases. When capacity is nonconstraining and the seller has pricing flexibility, we show that rationing in the clearance period cannot improve revenue. However, when prices are fixed in advance, rationing can improve revenue. In the latter case, we conduct a detailed analysis for linear and exponential demand curves and derive explicit expressions for optimal rationing levels. We find that the policy of doing the better of not restricting availability at the clearance price or not offering the product at the clearance price is typically near optimal. Our analysis also suggests that rationing—although sometimes offering considerable benefit over allowing unrestricted availability in the clearance period—may allow the seller to obtain only a small fraction of the optimal revenue when the prices are chosen optimally without rationing. We extend the analysis to cases where the capacity is constraining and obtain similar results.

Environmental issues are viewed as a serious problem with a complex network structure involving various stakeholders.

Using a large sample of China’s listed firms between 2005 and 2015, we find that domestic mutual funds have a positive effect on the CEO pay‐performance relationship, and this effect becomes stronger when their ownership is higher and closer to the controlling shareholder’s ownership. This effect is stronger in non‐state‐owned enterprises (non‐SOEs), firms facing weaker industry competition incentives, and firms located in more developed regions. However, Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFIIs) do not have such an influence. Overall, our study contends that the effectiveness of institutional investors’ monitoring role is subject to their identity, controlling shareholders and institutional environments.

Over time, opaque intermediaries, such as Hotwire and Priceline.com, have become an established distribution channel for the travel industry. We use a market response model and a dataset of economy class reservations from a major international airline to empirically examine the demand and cannibalization effects of the opaque channel. We find that: (1) the impact of the opaque channel on total demand is positive and significant in markets with high levels of competition; and (2) overall, the opaque channel cannibalizes the online transparent channel, but not the offline channel nor the full‐fare segment. However, we find that cannibalization of the offline channel moderately increases as markets become more concentrated. These results together suggest that airlines can benefit from opaque offerings mainly in markets with high levels of competition. Further, we develop a methodology to assess the revenue impacts of the opaque channel and show how it can be used by managers to develop and implement pricing tactics to increase demand and decrease cannibalization.

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