About

Haitao (Tony) Cui is a Professor of Marketing at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, where he also serves as the Deputy Associate Dean for the Global DBA Program and holds the Ecolab-Pierson M. Grieve Chair in International Marketing. He joined the faculty in 2005 after earning a PhD in Managerial Science and Applied Economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Cui also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Industrial & System Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research areas include behavioral modeling in marketing, branding, competitive strategies, distribution channels, marketing-operations interfaces, and pricing. Cui teaches a range of courses across PhD, DBA, EMBA, MBA, and Executive Development Programs at the Carlson School. He has been recognized for his teaching excellence, being voted Popular Professor of the Year multiple times by CHEMBA students and receiving several teaching awards, including the Carlson DBA Teaching Award in 2023 and 2024. His scholarly contributions have been acknowledged through numerous honors, such as being selected as an MSI Young Scholar, a Scholar of the MSI, and receiving awards from Management Science, including the Meritorious Service Award and the Distinguished Service Award. Cui serves as a Departmental Editor at Production and Operations Management, a Guest Associate Editor at Management Science, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Operations Management. He has held leadership roles such as Vice President of the POMS College of Behavioral Operations and Chair of the Academic Committee of the Behavioral Operations Research and Management Chapter of the Operations Research Society of China.

Research topics

• Business
• Microeconomics
• Economics
• Marketing
• Computer science

Selected publications

• Is Simplicity the Ultimate Sophistication? The Superiority of Linear Pricing

  Production and Operations Management · 2020-04-11 · 19 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We consider a supply chain with a supplier selling products to a retailer who is boundedly rational. The retailer’s orders are randomly distributed around the optimal order quantity. We develop a behavioral model which incorporates human retailers’ bounded rationality in the supplier’s contractual decisions. In contrast to a supply chain with a fully rational retailer, where a wholesale price contract usually cannot outperform more complicated nonlinear contracts, we find that when the retailer is boundedly rational a wholesale price contract can dominate commonly used nonlinear contracts, such as buyback and revenue sharing contracts, in terms of a supplier’s profit and supply chain profit. We characterize the conditions under which a wholesale price contract outperforms more sophisticated nonlinear contracts for the supplier. In particular, we show that a wholesale price contract is more likely to be implemented by the supplier when the supply chain profit margin is low, the retailer is less rational, the demand variance is large, and the retailer’s reservation value is high. We then conduct a series of laboratory experiments to test whether the behavioral model’s predictions are still salient even when the supplier is not necessarily rational. Our results provide an explanation for the prevalence of wholesale price contracts in business practice where the rationality of a retailer cannot always be guaranteed. We also find that a retailer’s bounded rationality plays a more important role in determining supply chain profit than a supplier’s bounded rationality.

  PublisherDOI

• Informational Challenges in Omnichannel Marketing: Remedies and Future Research

  Journal of Marketing · 2020 · 217 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Marketing
  • Business

  Omnichannel marketing is often viewed as the panacea for one-to-one marketing, but this strategic path is mired with obstacles. This article investigates three challenges in realizing the full potential of omnichannel marketing: (1) data access and integration, (2) marketing attribution, and (3) consumer privacy protection. While these challenges predate omnichannel marketing, they are exacerbated in a digital omnichannel environment. This article argues that advances in machine learning and blockchain offer some promising solutions. In turn, these technologies present new challenges and opportunities for firms, which warrant further academic research. The authors identify both recent developments in practice and promising avenues for future research.

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• Social motives in bilateral bargaining games: How power changes perceptions of fairness

  Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2019-09-18 · 16 citations

  articleSenior author
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• Social preferences and distribution channels

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2019-02-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this chapter the authors examine the effect on channel decisions and profitability of a class of preferences known as social preferences. They concentrate on fairness and provide results for analytical models of channel relationships in which the retailer cares for fairness. They show that such social preferences can coordinate the channel when the retailer is sufficiently adverse to inequity. The authors investigate how fairness affects the most popular channel-coordinating mechanisms (i.e., two-part tariffs and quantity discounts), and show that introducing these contracts in the presence of fairness leads to very different results in terms of profit distribution among channel members. They explore how different concepts of fairness impact the efficiency of the channel and extend the model to allow for fairness concerns on the manufacturer to confirm the channel-coordinating ability of fairness. The authors conclude with empirical predictions to be tested on field data in future research.

  PublisherDOI

• Social Motives in Bilateral Bargaining Games: How Power Changes Perceptions of Fairness

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2019-10-01

  articleSenior author

  Power, a fundamental characteristic of social interactions, characterizes one's ability to influence others. Fairness, inherently a type of social preference, impacts distributive decision-making. How does power shape the perceptions of fairness in economic interactions? While previous research finds that power holders tend to take more, it remains unclear whether they are driven by selfish motives to exploit weaker counterparts or act upon the belief that powerful individuals deserve more. With an innovative modified ultimatum game, we analytically and experimentally study how power interplays with fairness consideration to affect bilateral bargaining. We concentrate on behaviors by the responders, to elicit their fairness preferences in response to shifts in power. We find strong evidence that changes in power can modify what is perceived as a fair division in the modified ultimatum game, and thus influence the distributive behaviors and outcomes. However, such an effect only arises when there is common knowledge about the power distribution between the two parties prior to their decision-making. In addition, we find that, while feedback on past decisions and outcomes can help players fine-tune their choices to avoid money left on the table in bargaining, learning from experience is not required for power to take effect.

  Publisher

• Incorporating Behavioral Factors into Operations Theory

  2018-10-19 · 15 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Human behavioral factors have significant impacts on people's decision-makings and corporates' decisions and performance. Given the extensive adoption of quantitative modeling techniques in operations management/research and the advantages of precision and generalizability that quantitative modeling has, there is a need to extend the existing and develop new operations theories via analytical models that incorporate well-documented behavioral constructs. In this chapter, we introduce commonly used behavioral models and summarize the differences between these models and their respective applicable scenarios. The chapter also discusses how to develop behavioral operations models and provides guidelines for deriving empirically testable predictions.

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• Promotions as competitive reactions to recalls and their consequences

  Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science · 2018-10-11 · 13 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Responses to rival exit: Product variety, market expansion, and preexisting market structure

  Strategic Management Journal · 2018-10-11 · 43 citations

  articleSenior author

  Research Summary This study investigates incumbent responses to a main rival's exit. We argue that long‐time rivals have developed an equilibrium by offering a mix of overlapping and unique products and by choosing geographic proximity to each other. A rival's exit, however, disrupts this equilibrium and motivates surviving firms to expand in both product and geographic spaces to seek a new equilibrium. Using data from all U.S. Best Buy stores before and after the exit of Circuit City, we find that Best Buy uses product variety expansion as its major response in markets where Circuit City was colocated, but it more often responds by opening new stores in non‐colocated markets. Regardless of preexisting market structures, the magnitude of product variety expansion decreases with the opening of new stores. Managerial Summary How do surviving firms respond to a major rival's exit? By studying Best Buy's responses to Circuit City's withdrawal, we find the survivor expands in both product space (increasing product variety) and geographic space (opening new stores), due to two motives. First, the survivor strives to fill in “holes” left in the market. Second, the survivor experiences uncertainty in the postexit world wherein its reference point is gone, threat of potential entry looms, and it lacks information about new entrants. Thus, it must deter potential entry ex ante by preempting many prime product and geographic locations. Best Buy also responds according to preexisting market structures, primarily through product variety expansion in markets wherein Circuit City was colocated and through opening new stores in non‐colocated markets.

  PublisherDOI

• Cognitive Hierarchy in Capacity Allocation Games

  Management Science · 2017-02-22 · 45 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We examine a supply chain with a single supplier and multiple retailers to predict retailers’ actual ordering behaviors. If retailer orders exceed supplier capacity, a proportional rationing rule applies to capacity allocation among retailers. We propose a behavior model based on cognitive hierarchy theory, in which retailers with different levels of strategic-reasoning capabilities form heterogeneous beliefs about other players’ capabilities when choosing their orders. This behavioral model yields three interesting predictions. First, retailers’ orders increase as the number of retailers decreases or the supplier’s production capacity shrinks. Second, the orders tend to increase as the retailer population becomes more “sophisticated.” Third, retailers’ profits first increase in relation to their strategic-reasoning capabilities and then decrease, indicating an inverted U-shaped relationship between profits and strategic-reasoning capabilities. We experimentally examine the capacity allocation game with participants motivated by financial incentives. The experimental results and structural model estimation confirm the predictions of the behavioral model. Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2655 . This paper was accepted by Gad Allon, operations management.

  PublisherDOI

• Fairness Ideals in Distribution Channels

  Journal of Marketing Research · 2016-11-11 · 74 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The authors analytically and experimentally evaluate how firms make decisions in a two-stage dyadic channel, in which firms decide on investments in the first stage and then on prices in the second stage. They find that firms’ behavior differs significantly from the predictions of the standard economic model and is consistent with the existence of fairness concerns. Using a quantal response equilibrium model, in which both manufacturer and retailer make noisy best responses, the authors show that fairness significantly affects channel pricing decisions. In addition, they investigate what affects the perceptions of fairness. More specifically, they analyze whether the notion of fairness is influenced by social norms of strict equality, by endogenous investments and contributions that are affected by players’ decisions, or by the exogenous game structure. To do so, the authors compare four principles of distributive fairness: strict egalitarianism; liberal egalitarianism; libertarianism; and a sequence-aligned ideal, which is studied for the first time in the literature. Surprisingly, the exogenous game structure reflected by the new ideal, whereby the sequence of moving determines the equitable payoff for players, significantly outperforms other fairness ideals, suggesting that equity in distribution channels can arise even in contests in which channel members have fairly different payoffs.

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Frequent coauthors

• Raghuram Iyengar

  University of Pennsylvania

  36 shared

• Anindya Ghose

  New York University

  36 shared

• Sriraman Venkataraman

  Quantitative BioSciences

  36 shared

• S. Sriram

  Ross School

  36 shared

• Catherine E. Tucker

  36 shared

• Hanna Hałaburda

  36 shared

• Koen Pauwels

  Northeastern University

  36 shared

• Yan Dong

  12 shared

Awards & honors

• Carlson DBA Teaching Award in 2023 and 2024
• Voted by Carlson CHEMBA EMBA students as the "Popular Profes…
• Carlson School Teaching Award in 2020
• 2019 Award for "Outstanding Teaching and Dedication to Helpi…
• Marketing Science Institute (MSI) Scholars (2018)