The paper "Searching for Rewards," authored by Zhu Xu, a postdoctoral fellow from the School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, has recently been accepted for publication in Management Science, one of the prestigious UTD 24 journals. This research was supported by the 2023 ISMS Doctoral Early-Stage Research Grant. Zhu Xu serves as the corresponding author, with collaborators Professor T. Tony Ke from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Professor Jiwoong Shin from Yale University.

Loyalty programs are widespread across various markets, offering members rewards based on their past purchases for future benefits. This study offers new insights into the strategic use of loyalty programs and their impact on market competition by exploring the dynamics of loyalty programs within a repeated ordered search framework, in which consumers sequentially search for the optimal product across multiple firms over two periods. The research employs game-theoretic modeling and lies at the intersection of customer relationship management and consumer search theory.

Editor: Liu Tingting