About

Wedad J. Elmaghraby is the Dean's Chair of Operations Management and serves as the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. Her research interests lie at the intersection of operations management, economics, and behavioral decision-making. Her current research includes market design to promote sustainable business paradigms in operations, online auctions in business-to-business secondary markets, and behavioral factors in consumer decision making and business-to-business contract design. She has held prominent roles such as serving as an Amazon Scholar and the President-Elect of INFORMS, and has previously served as a Department Editor at Management & Science Operations Management, Senior Editor at POMS, and as President of the MSOM Society, the Behavioral Operations Section, and the POMS College of Behavior in Operations Management. Her work also includes co-directing the Smith Analytics Consortium and leading initiatives on artificial intelligence and learning. Dr. Elmaghraby has contributed extensively to the field through her research, which explores various aspects of marketplace design, online auctions, and market expansion, with a focus on sustainability, platform optimization, and the impact of marquee sellers in online marketplaces.

Research topics

• Business
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Finance
• Commerce
• Marketing
• Geography
• Microeconomics
• Advertising
• Industrial organization

Selected publications

• Personalized Assortment Optimization for a Subscription Business Model of Experience Goods

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Marketplace Expansion Through Marquee Seller Adoption: Externalities and Reputation Implications

  Management Science · 2025-05-26

  article

  In the race to establish themselves, many early-stage online marketplaces choose to accelerate their growth by adding marquee (established brand name) sellers. We study the implications of marquee seller entry on smaller, unbranded sellers in a marketplace when both unbranded sellers and marquee sellers can vary vertically across reputation (referred to as sellers’ quality). Although recent literature has shown that higher-quality unbranded sellers fare better than their lower-quality peers, we posit that this may not hold for entrants of any quality. To this end, we collaborate with an online business-to-business platform and exploit the entry of two marquee sellers of vastly differing quality. Using a difference-in-difference-in-differences framework, we causally identify the effect. We find that, although higher-quality unbranded seller revenues increase relative to low-quality unbranded sellers when the entrant is of superior quality (consistent with the literature), the effect is reversed when the entrant is of inferior quality. Further, unbranded sellers change their supply quantities such that the platform’s average supply quality shifts in the direction of entrant quality. Using a stylized theoretical model, we identify two mechanisms that drive our findings: (i) new buyers brought in by the entrant disproportionately favor unbranded sellers who are quality neighbors to the entrant and (ii) the unbranded seller’s ability to adjust their supply quantities. Most notably, the choice of marquee sellers, examined through the lens of their externality on unbranded sellers, can foster or undermine the platform’s long-term growth objectives. This paper was accepted by Victor Martinez de Albéniz, operations management. Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.03606 .

  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Ease-of-Return Experience on Contingent Free Shipping Policies

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Impact of Markdown Price Strategy on Returns: A Price Transparency and Valuation Uncertainty Story

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• An Empirical Study of Blockchain-Driven Transparency in a Consumer Marketplace

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Impressionable or Immune? Examining the Influence of Marquee Sellers in B2B Secondary Market Platforms for IT Products

  Information Systems Research · 2022 · 7 citations

  • Business
  • Commerce
  • Advertising

  Consumers around the world have moved dramatically toward online platforms. Purchasing goods and services from independent suppliers through digital platforms has become a routine part of daily life. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the paradigm shift toward digital economy and servitization. Data show that ecommerce sales have grown by $32 billion during the last two years ( https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/coronavirus-impact-online-retail/ ). A large part of this ecommerce is on platforms-based models, where management of the platform community remains a difficult problem. One such question often discussed in the platforms context remains: Does acquiring a marquee seller help the platform owner? If so, how exactly? We show that in the specific context of B2B platforms, the impact of a marquee seller’s presence is significantly positive on prices obtained by other sellers on the platform. This is because the marquee seller generates higher prices, given its brand, and these prices become reference prices for other sellers. The managerial implications highlight the importance of acquiring marquee sellers and encourage platform owners to understand the associated price effects. Our paper suggests that platform owners should consider and target sellers with marquee brand names, as they can result in a sugar-rush for prices of other sellers on the platform.

  PublisherDOI

• Adverse Selection in B2B Secondary Market Online Auctions for IT Equipment: An Empirical Analysis

  MIS Quarterly · 2022-09-01 · 4 citations

  article

  Online business-to-business auctions for used IT products have emerged as a viable market for finding a second life for these products, rather than having them end up in landfills as e-waste. As part of the growing “secondary market” landscape, these online B2B auctions are significantly affected by adverse selection since uncertainty about product quality from their first life remains in place. We study how these adverse selection costs may be identified and reduced in online B2B auctions for mobile phones using a proprietary data set for pallets of iPhone devices. We focus on the differences between carrier-locked and unlocked iPhones, and the degree to which the jailbreaking of devices may lead to adverse selection costs. We first show that uncertainty with respect to the possibility of jailbreaking-to-unlock induces significant adverse selection costs in this market. We identify a clear method that these adverse selection costs may be reduced through policies implemented in the primary market. We find that adverse selection costs exist with respect to jailbreaking-to-unlock, by comparing prices obtained for locked and unlocked devices, as well as pallets where this information is not disclosed. However, when some of the uncertainty surrounding jailbreaking-to-unlock is removed by virtue of an exogenous policy change implemented by Verizon in the primary market, i.e., to sell all iPhones as factory unlocked, adverse selection costs are significantly reduced. Our work has significant implications for enhancing the efficiency of secondary markets for IT products, by virtue of highlighting the connections between primary and secondary markets. Managerial and theoretical implications that emerge from this work are discussed in the paper.

  PublisherDOI

• Partitioning cash flows to overcome retailer aversion to stocking new products

  Decision Sciences · 2021-01-29 · 2 citations

  article

  Abstract Because decision makers tend to dislike ambiguity, the uncertainty surrounding new products can act as a barrier to retailer acceptance. We propose that by changing the structure of cash flows in the contract offered to a retailer (keeping net payments constant), a manufacturer can shift a retailer from making ambiguity‐averse to ambiguity‐neutral choices, thereby increasing the retailer's willingness to stock new products. In a series of studies, we demonstrate that contracts structured to provide positive cash flows after ambiguity has been resolved can increase the retailer's willingness to choose products with an unknown demand distribution. Thus, contracts with positive postdemand payments to the retailer have the potential to increase acceptance of new products.

  PublisherDOI

• On Examining The Influence of Marquee Sellers in B2B Secondary Market Platforms for IT Products

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2021-07-26

  article

  While digital platforms have become mainstream, there still remain some unanswered questions pertaining to managing platform ecosystems. One such unexplored question pertains to the effect of marquee sellers on the platform – marquee sellers arguably attract other sellers and buyers to the platform, thereby enhancing the platform’s value. In this paper, we study how adding a marquee seller to a B2B secondary market platform for IT products affects other sellers, in terms of the prices they obtain for comparable products. Using proprietary data on B2B secondary market auctions obtained from a platform provider, we show that the entry of a marquee seller has a positive effect on the prices obtained by other sellers on the platform, reflecting a reference price effect. We further show that this positive effect on final prices is moderated by the extent to which bidders are active on multiple seller sites on the same platform, and the extent to which bidders participate in the marquee seller site. We explain these effects using theory in multi-homing and involvement, in terms of how reference prices are set. Our work extends the platforms literature by considering the specific influence of a marquee seller on other sellers, thereby informing platform owners on the implications of the advice to add more marquee sellers to platforms. We also contribute to the literature on secondary markets for durable, used IT products, which are instrumental in reducing e-waste and mitigating the environmental damage done by electronic products in landfills.

  PublisherDOI

• Contingent Free Shipping: Drivers of Bubble Purchases

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021 · 4 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Anandasivam Gopal

  Nanyang Technological University

  10 shared

• Pınar Keskinocak

  7 shared

• Nathan Larson

  American University

  6 shared

• Ali Pilehvar

  6 shared

• Abdullah Alhauli

  4 shared

• Shu Zhang

  Northeast Normal University

  3 shared

• Ashish Kabra

  3 shared

• Ken Moon

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• INFORMS President-Elect
• Smith Analytics Consortium co-director