We ask whether youg agents prefer to work in different-age or same-age production pairs in an OLG model where wages are reputation-based. We find that high-productivity workers prefer inter- to intra-generational teams for two reasons. First, inter-generational teams allow us to identify better workers' productivity as the older worker, with a longer work history, supplies more information which the principal can use for signal extraction. Second, inter-generational teams shift the steady-state probability distribution that a worker is of high productivity away from the unimformative region, to the fully-revealing extremes. This benefits higher-productivity workers and penalizes low-productivity ones.

We study the effects of introducing a store brand in a distribution channel where the retailer promotes the national brand characterized by strong brand equity. We show that the private label is beneficial to the retailer: it increases its profits and category demand. However, it constitutes a threat to the manufacturer: it lessens his profits and demand rate. We investigate the efficiency for the manufacturer to use a cooperative advertising program in order to counter this threat and found that the coop plan improves the channel’s profits. It is also an efficient strategy to recover a part of the manufacturer’s loss generated by the store brand introduction.

Suppliers often collaborate with manufacturing companies on developing new products. But there is a potential tradeoff in their endeavor. On the one hand, there needs to be a short-term collaboration between the supplier and the manufacturer on the manufacturer’s current product. For instance, in order to gain a larger market share for the existing product, it would be important for the product’s quality to improve and/or for its price to decrease. The manufacturer expects its supplier to support its efforts to improve its existing product value. On the other hand, the manufacturer needs its supplier’s help for developing a new product, which is necessary for the manufacturing company to continue to grow in the market. Compared with the joint efforts to improve the existing product quality, collaborating for new product development is a long-term endeavor. Now the fundamental issue facing the supplier and the manufacturer respectively is how to allocate its resources between improving the existing product and developing a new one. By improving the existing product, they expect to increase their short term profitability. By enhancing the chance to have a successful new product development, they can expect to earn future profit, which is vital for their continuous growth. Since they have to allocate their present resources between current operations and future possibility, they are facing a tradeoff decision problem.