Problem definition: This paper studies an emerging omnichannel on-demand economy, where consumers decide how their orders are delivered through a platform: fulfilled by independent couriers or picked up in-store by themselves. We analyze the platform’s optimal pricing strategies across service channels and its wage-setting decisions for couriers and assess the resulting welfare implications. Methodology/results: We develop a stylized model to study how buy-online-and-pick-up-in-store (BOPS) influences pricing on both the courier and consumer sides. We then estimate model primitives using data from a leading meal-delivery platform in China and use these estimates to quantify the effects of BOPS. Our main results are as follows. First, although it is widely recognized that price is positively related to demand for gig services, this conventional wisdom no longer holds in an omnichannel environment with BOPS, particularly when consumers are less sensitive to delivery congestion. Second, although BOPS shifts the burden of delivery cost from the platform to consumers, the BOPS-channel price need not be lower than the delivery-channel price in a gig-economy setting. Third, although BOPS always improves platform and merchant profits, it enhances consumer surplus only when market demand is sufficiently great while consistently reducing courier welfare. Managerial implications: In an omnichannel environment, pricing strategies proven effective in the traditional gig economy may become suboptimal. Moreover, because the gains from BOPS are unevenly distributed, platform managers and policymakers should look beyond aggregate gains and consider the welfare losses that BOPS adoption imposes on couriers. Funding: Y. Guo gratefully acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72471218 and 72188101]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2025.0109 .

Problem definition: Growing environmental awareness is prompting consumers to consider reusable alternatives to disposable packaging, driving firms in the takeaway food and beverage sector to explore reusable packaging models. In addition to encouraging consumers to use their personal reusable packaging, some firms now offer firm-owned reusable packaging as an alternative reuse option. This paper examines how price incentives and convenience enhancements shape consumers’ packaging choices and the resulting environmental and profitability implications of reusable packaging models. Methodology/results: Using a game-theoretical model, we analyze a firm’s pricing and reuse-program decisions when consumers choose among disposable packaging, consumer-owned reusable packaging, and firm-owned reusable packaging. Our key findings are as follows. First, a more eco-conscious market does not necessarily strengthen the firm’s incentive to introduce a firm-owned reusable packaging program. When disposable packaging is inexpensive, the program’s main value lies in price discrimination rather than market expansion; as the market becomes more eco-conscious, this price-discrimination benefit weakens. Second, when disposable packaging is costly, the introduction of firm-owned reusable packaging can increase packaging waste, as the firm may strategically reduce the price discount for consumer-owned reuse. Finally, convenience improvements have asymmetric effects. Improving the convenience of consumer-owned reuse generally reduces packaging waste. However, making the return process more convenient for firm-owned reuse can increase packaging waste by shifting some consumers from consumer-owned to firm-owned reuse, which remains subject to nonreturn risk. Managerial implications: Firms in the takeaway food and beverage sector should jointly manage firm-owned and consumer-owned reusable packaging. Price incentives and convenience design should be evaluated based on how they shift consumers across packaging options and affect the tension between firm profitability and packaging waste reduction. Funding: This work was supported by the Major Research Project in Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education of China [Grant 2026JZDZ011]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2025.0594 .

In this paper, we consider a firm selling a product with packaging. Many firms have recentlyallowed for consumer engagement in the "bring-your-own-container" (BYOC) program, whereconsumers can contribute to reducing packaging waste via using their own reusable packaging.We develop a stylized model to study the firm's pricing, green product and packaging designdecisions when it chooses to implement the BYOC program. We further study one commongovernment regulation, i.e., the environmental standard on product packaging. Our main resultsfollow. First, it could be profitable for a firm to offer consumers who engage in the BYOCprogram a discount larger than the save in packaging cost. Second, after the implementationof the BYOC program, while the firm tends to spend less effort on the environmental qualityof its disposable packaging, it may take more effort to reduce the negative environmentalimpact of its product. Third, a stricter environmental standard on packaging can inducethe firm to make both packaging and the product itself greener; even so, it may surprisinglyhurt the environment overall, due to its impact on firm's decisions regarding its BYOC program.

Problem definition: A growing number of firms are encouraging consumers to participate in “bring-your-own-container” (BYOC) behavior in which consumers bring their own reusable packaging to purchase and consume products, thus reducing single-use packaging waste. In this paper, we study the environmental implications of a firm’s BYOC implementation when considering its disposable packaging choice and communication strategy. Methodology/results: We build a stylized model to study a firm’s joint decisions on BYOC, disposable packaging choice, and communication and their implications on the environment. Our main results follow. First, allowing BYOC reduces the firm’s incentive to make fraudulent green claims about its disposable product packaging; however, BYOC implementation may harm the overall environment while improving the firm’s profit, thereby creating a new form of greenwashing. Second, the adoption of third-party certification for green disposable packaging is an effective remedy to mitigate the negative environmental impact of BYOC. In addition, the environmental implications of adopting third-party certification (either voluntarily or because of government mandates) depend on the relationship between the environmental qualities of green disposable packaging and reusable packaging. Whereas it always benefits the environment when the firm’s green disposable packaging has better environmental performance, adopting certification may negatively impact the environment if consumers’ reusable packaging is greener. Furthermore, we find numerically that offering a price discount for BYOC may encourage the firm to adopt certification because of increased profitability, thereby leading to the aforementioned environmental implications. Managerial implications: We offer operational insights on how firms should make joint decisions on BYOC, disposable packaging choice, and communication. We also generate insights on how governments should regulate firms’ green claims when firms start to allow BYOC. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2021.0605 .

We examine a large transaction-level data set of an Italian omnichannel furniture retailer to study channel-specific effects of fulfillment lead time on demand. This omnichannel retailer sells the same products and has the same product fulfillment across three channels: showroom, online, and catalog. The showroom channel carries no inventory but allows customers to touch and feel the products. The online channel provides a website for consumers to browse and order the products. The catalog channel sends a product catalog to all the households in Italy, so they can place an order over the phone. We find that the showroom channel makes consumers less sensitive to fulfillment lead time than both online and catalog channels. In particular, a 10% increase in lead time (1.83 days from the sample mean of 18.26 days) causes a 0.29% reduction in the daily sales volume (approximately 29 units from the sample mean of 10,140 units per day) at the showroom, which is less than the reduction of 1.85% and 0.92% in the online and the catalog channels, respectively. This finding contradicts the common practical and theoretical assumption about homogeneous lead time sensitivity across channels. In addition, we find that niche products and experience goods accentuate the difference of lead time sensitivity between showroom and nonphysical channels. Through an online experiment, we show that higher product information precision, such as that provided in a showroom, can alleviate customers’ anxiety around product uncertainty, thus reducing lead time sensitivity and increasing purchase intent. We further build two analytical models to show the implications of our empirical results for showroom network design and inventory rationing decisions. Our study highlights the previously ignored fulfillment time sensitivity aspect of the physical store’s value. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4839 .

Cause marketing (CM) is a common practice in which firms donate proceeds from individual sales to partnering nonprofit organizations (NPOs). There are two types of CM campaigns based on the donation type: earmarked or flexible. Earmarked donations are restricted for a specific program of the NPO, whereas flexible donations have no such restrictions. Even though earmarked donations are frequently preferred by individual donors, which may result in more donations, this donation type may negatively affect NPOs' operational performance per dollar, i.e., the ability to convert donations to aid. Therefore, NPOs prefer flexible donations given that this donation type gives NPOs the authority to decide how to use the donations while increasing their performance. In this paper, we study how NPOs can leverage CM campaigns to raise a mix of earmarked and flexible donations. We use a multi-method research approach where we combine an online experiment with an analytical study. Through the online experiment, we replicate a real-world online purchase scenario and study the effect of CM campaign type (i.e., earmarked or flexible) on consumers' purchase intent. We use product attributes that indicate quality (i.e., brand familiarity, price, average user rating, and number of ratings) to study the interplay of CM campaign type and product attributes. Using results from our experiment, we build an optimization model that maximizes NPOs' utility as a function of the amount of earmarked and flexible donations they receive as well as the associated operational performance per dollar. Our experiment shows that consumers prefer earmarked CM when the CM campaign type is one of the main driving forces of the purchase decision. When the product attributes primarily drive the purchase decision, the CM campaign type is secondary; thereby, consumers become indifferent between the two CM campaign types. Our model helps NPOs better allocate their fundraising budget when implementing CM campaigns. Moreover, the benefit of improved budget allocation increases as the NPOs’ fundraising budget increases. Our findings allow NPOs and firms to create more intentional CM campaigns such that the NPOs raise additional donations without compromising the operational performance while the firms increase sales.

The triple bottom line, coined by the famed business writer John Elkington, consists of three elements - profit, people, and the planet. It maintains that companies should commit to focusing as much on environmental and social issues as they do on profits. This chapter reviews existing literature that focuses on the financial and environmental impacts of product design, and presents recent work to motivate research needs on the social impact of product design. It also includes a general demand model that can serve as a starting point for future researchers to develop methodologies to help companies address product design issues with the triple bottom line.

Most retailers today sell products through an online channel in addition to traditional physical stores. We investigate how such a multichannel or omnichannel retailer should decide the number and size of physical stores. We show that a higher return rate for online purchases can incentivize the retailer to have fewer physical stores that are larger in size. As online shopping becomes more convenient, a retailer may prefer to have more physical stores that are smaller in size. We also study the effect of three popular omnichannel strategies that involve changes of the physical stores’ functions: (i) showrooms only display products for customers to inspect before they purchase online, removing fulfillment from physical stores; (ii) return flexibility expands the functionality of physical stores by allowing customers to return online orders at them; and (iii) fulfillment flexibility expands functionality by allowing customers to pick up products purchased online at physical stores. We show that when the physical stores are given fewer (more) functions, as with the showroom (return or fulfillment flexibility) strategy, the omnichannel retailer may find it optimal to increase (reduce) the number and/or size of the physical stores. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

Research Summary: In this paper, we study two strategies that have been used by sustainable firms to cope with unsustainable knockoffs: (i) releasing green technology as open source and (ii) launching an anti-knockoff advertising campaign to reduce consumers' social reward from buying the knockoffs. We build a game-theoretical model to analyze the market competition between a sustainable firm with proprietary technology and a knockoff competitor with an environmentally unsustainable product. We identify conditions under which the sustainable firm should launch an anti-knockoff advertising campaign or open-source its technology. Additionally, we find that it can be profitable for a sustainable firm to pursue both approaches simultaneously, highlighting the complementary effect of the two. Managerial Summary: Many sustainable firms find they are competing with unsustainable knockoffs in the fashion industry. In general, a sustainable firm can treat the knockoff competitor as a foe (by launching an anti-knockoff advertising campaign) or as a friend (by open-sourcing its green technology). We find that even if launching an anti-knockoff advertising campaign incurs no cost, it may still not be profitable for a firm to do so. Additionally, it could be profitable for a firm to share its green technology for free with the knockoff competitor, especially when there is a large number of eco-conscious consumers in the market. Furthermore, the sustainable firm may sometimes need to adopt both the combative approach (i.e., anti-knockoff advertising) and the cooperative approach (open-sourcing) simultaneously.

Greenwashing, which is defined as the intersection of a firm's poor environmental performance and positive communication about its environmental performance, is a common phenomenon in the green packaging market. Bring-your-own-container (BYOC), becomes a growing eco-trend among eco-conscious consumers, where consumers use their own reusable container instead of the disposable packaging offered by the firm to buy and consume products. In this paper, we develop a stylized model to examine the impacts of BYOC on a firm's packaging and communication decisions. We further study the profit and environmental implications if greenwashing is stopped (e.g., by credible third-party certifications or government regulations). Our main results follow. First, when some consumers start using their own reusable container, demand for the firm-offered green disposable packaging is expected to decrease, but a profit-maximizing firm might paradoxically spend more efforts creating a green image of its product packaging, either by adopting green packaging or even engaging in greenwashing. Second, it could be profitable for a firm to adopt an unverifiable self-label rather than a credible third-party certification to disclose the green quality of its product packaging, even if the latter is costless. Finally, it might not always be wise for the government to regulate greenwashing, since it could cause a negative impact on the environment given the BYOC trend.

Consider a firm that is developing an innovative product. We study the trade‐offs associated with its product design decisions in regards to product performance (the function of the product), product reliability (whether the product will perform its function), and product time‐to‐market (the development time for the product). Specifically, while a more innovative product may deliver better product performance, without sufficient development time, the product may not be as reliable given that innovations require a time buffer to conduct many iterations of product testing and improvement. We further examine the impact of a government‐imposed minimum product reliability standard on the firm, the product, and on social welfare. We find that contrary to common belief, a minimum product reliability standard set by the government may induce more unreliable products or hurt consumer surplus and social welfare. We also find that regulation, besides being a cost burden to the firm, can serve as a credible commitment for product reliability typically not observable to the customers when they are making purchasing decisions. Correspondingly, the regulation may have the surprising effect of increasing firm profit or prompting product innovation. Our work is useful in informing regulators in different industries of how decisions concerning government regulation could impact product reliability.

We examine a large transaction-level data set of an Italian omnichannel furniture retailer to study channel-specific effects of fulfillment lead time on demand. This omnichannel retailer sells the same products and has the same product fulfillment across three channels – showroom, online and catalog. A showroom channel carries no inventory but allows customers to touch and feel the products. An online channel provides a website for consumers to browse and order the products. A catalog channel sends a product catalog to all the households in Italy for them to place an order over the phone. We find that the showroom channel makes consumers less sensitive to fulfillment lead time than both online and catalog channels. In particular, a 10% increase in lead time (1.84 days from the sample mean of 18.35 days) causes a 0.85% reduction in the sales per order (~ EUR 7.6 from the sample mean of EUR 889.94) at the showroom, less than the reduction of 1.14% and 1.23% in the online and the catalog channels, respectively. This finding contradicts the common practical and theoretical assumption about homogeneous lead time sensitivity across channels. In addition, we find that niche products and experience goods accentuate the difference of lead time sensitivity between showroom and non-physical channels. We further develop a stylized model to study the implications of our empirical findings for the design of an omnichannel retailer’s facility network. Given our finding that shows the showroom wait sensitivity is smaller than online wait sensitivity, retailers should build fewer but larger showrooms than the homogeneous wait sensitivity suggests.

In the omnichannel era, consumers optimize their shopping experience by exhaustively considering all possible alternatives across both online and offline channels. In this chapter, we present new approaches to model consumer behavior in the omnichannel environment. We start by reviewing traditional models of strategic consumer behavior and then apply them to omnichannel initiatives in the retail industry. These omnichannel strategies help mitigate two key problems in retail: stockouts and product misfit. We hope that our models can inspire future research in the emerging area of omnichannel retailing.

In this paper, we model a firm that can reduce its carbon footprint in the presence of a segment of eco-conscious consumers, who consider the product’s carbon footprint when making purchasing decisions. The firm can reduce its controllable emissions at increased fixed and variable costs. The firm can also buy carbon offsets, at the price set by a nongovernmental organization (NGO), for both its controllable and uncontrollable emissions in the supply chain. We find that the firm should not use these two emission reduction methods as simple substitutes. In particular, as the offset price decreases, the firm may spend more efforts reducing its controllable emissions. Also, a firm’s decision to buy carbon offsets depends on the correlation between consumers’ preferences for the product function and for its environmental attributes, and this has implications for NGOs selling offsets. Specifically, although NGOs should price offsets as low as possible in most cases, we find some instances where a premium pricing strategy may be more effective in promoting lower-carbon footprint products, especially when eco-conscious consumers have a significantly higher valuation for the product than those who do not care about the environment, on average. This paper was accepted by Jayashankar Swaminathan, operations management. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4293 .

Many online retailers offer free shipping services if customers spend more than a threshold amount. We use a unique transaction-level dataset from a large online retailer to study the impacts of free shipping threshold on consumer shopping behavior across two different online channels, mobile and PC channels. Specifically, we focus on customer order padding behavior, i.e., strategically adding items to a shopping cart to qualify for free shipping. We find that customers are more likely to pad their orders on the PC channel than on the mobile channel. We attribute this impact to the different search cost on the two channels. Furthermore, we find that the way customers pad their orders is different. Specifically, in order to increase basket size, customers on the mobile channel rely more on buying a larger quantity of the same item, while users placing their order on the PC channel prefer to add new products to the shopping cart and/or to purchase higher-priced substitutes.

Many restaurants have recently implemented self-order technologies across both online and offline channels. Online technology, through websites and mobile apps, allows customers to order and pay before coming to the store; offline technology, such as self-service kiosks, allows store customers to place orders without interacting with a human employee. In this paper, we develop a stylized theoretical model to study the impact of self-order technologies on customer demand, employment levels, and restaurant profits. Our main results follow. First, customers using self-order technologies experience reduced waiting cost and increased demand, and moreover, these benefits may even carry over to customers who do not use these technologies. Second, although public opinion suggests that self-order technologies facilitate job cuts, we find instead that some firms should increase employment levels, and, paradoxically, this recommendation holds for firms with high labor costs. Finally, we find that firms should implement online offline self-order technology when customers have high low wait sensitivity.The supplementary appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2787. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.

We study competing firms' green product design decisions, and the effect of two common types of government support, namely R&D support and sales subsidies, on the products, firms and the resulting environmental impact. Each firm produces a product that contains a "traditional" quality and an "environmental" quality according to corresponding technology capabilities of the firm and market competition. Our main results are as follows. First, we show that firms will produce greener products and charge higher prices when they embrace greater technology capabilities related to production of the environmental quality, or when consumers become more conscious of the environmental impact. Second, we find that although both the government R&D support and sales subsidies prompt firms to produce greener products, the overall environmental impact is mixed. Specifically, while sales subsidies generally lead to positive environmental benefits, R&D support can have an unanticipated negative overall impact on the environment. Third, we show that firms do not always benefit from either type of the government support.

Problem definition: In a cause marketing (CM) campaign, a firm donates part of its sales revenue to a charity for a social cause when customers purchase the cause-linked product. We study a firm’s pricing decisions with CM and the implications for the participating charity. We also consider the design and distribution of cause-linked products. Academic/practical relevance: CM has become popular in recent years. However, there is little analytical work on how a firm’s strategic actions (e.g., product pricing, design, and distribution) impact the effectiveness of a CM campaign. We address this gap. Methodology: Game theory. Results: First, it may be optimal for the firm to decrease the price after the implementation of CM despite the donation cost. Second, a higher level of firm–cause fit may lead to a smaller total donation amount to the charity in a CM campaign. Third, the choice to design a special version of the product for a CM campaign depends on the size of the prosocial segment in the market. Fourth, a decentralized supply chain may generate more social value through CM compared with the centralized case. Managerial implications: For firms, we show that it may not be optimal to increase the price of cause-linked products and identify conditions where firms should introduce a special product in a CM campaign. For charities, we show that a high firm–cause fit level may have a negative effect on the total donation amount and further identify conditions under which charities should collaborate with a downstream retailer or an upstream manufacturer in a CM campaign. Our results indicate that the correlation between customer preferences for the product and the social cause has a significant impact in a CM campaign for both firms and charities.

Many retailers have recently started to offer customers the option to buy online and pick up in store BOPS. We study the impact of the BOPS initiative on store operations. We build a stylized model where a retailer operates both online and offline channels. Customers strategically make channel choices. The BOPS option affects customer choice in two ways: by providing real-time information about inventory availability and by reducing the hassle cost of shopping. We obtain three findings. First, not all products are well suited for in-store pickup; specifically, it may not be profitable to implement BOPS on products that sell well in stores. Second, BOPS enables retailers to reach new customers, but for existing customers, the shift from online fulfillment to store fulfillment may decrease profit margins when the latter is less cost effective. Finally, in a decentralized retail system where store and online channels are managed separately, BOPS revenue can be shared across channels to alleviate incentive conflicts; it is rarely efficient to allocate all the revenue to a single channel.This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.