PhD Proposal Defense – Three Essays on Operations Management Interfaces with Marketing and Finance

Research Interest
Nowadays, operations management interacting with other business areas has raised many interesting research questions. The first two manuscripts of this dissertation study problems in operations managementmarketing interface while the final manuscripts focus on operations managementfinance interface.

In the first problem, we present a model to study strategic response of a dominant retailer to an operationally improving fringe retailer. We show that as the fringe retailer reduces its operational costs, the dominant retailer and the national brand manufacturer would prefer to reduce their joint advertisement efforts. This allows the dominant retailer to receive more favorable unit prices from the manufacturer.

The second problem studies an entrepreneur’s pricing strategy in a reward-based crowdfunding campaign to signal project’s quality to the crowd. We propose and evaluate two signaling mechanisms: One-price and two-price signaling. We demonstrate that an entrepreneur can signal its quality through just one-price posted in the fundraising period and this mechanism may dominate the two-price signaling.

And, finally, the last manuscript studies the optimal hedging strategy of risk-neutral firms in supply chain settings, in which a retailer procuring through index-based contracts from two commodity processors. We characterize the optimal contracts for processors, and show that they prefer to partially hedge their exposure to commodity price risks.