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+Summary of the paper
+====================
+
+This paper proposes a formal analysis of the "showrooming" phenomenon:
+brick-and-mortar stores being used by consumers as a way to explore products
+before buying them from online stores, effectively turning brick-and-mortar
+stores into showrooms for online retailers. The authors model this phenomenon
+as a competition between the brick-and-mortar retailer and the online retailer,
+where the online retailer decides on a retail price while the brick-and-mortar
+retailer decides on a retail price as well as a "sales effort". The competition
+is then analyzed as Stackelberg game where either the online retailer or the
+brick-and-mortar retailer moves first. In both cases, a closed-form expression
+for the equilibrium is derived. The authors then proceed to a numerical
+exploration of the equilibrium by plotting demand and profit for varying levels
+of showrooming intensity and analyzing the optimal strategies of both retails
+in multiple scenarios. Finally, an alternative strategy for the
+brick-and-mortar retailer, opening an online store, is proposed and analyzed.
+
+Novelty of the work
+===================
+
+As the authors mention in the related work section, very little research has
+focused on theoretically analyzing showrooming. This paper does so by bringing
+together two streams of literature: the first one studying competition between
+retailers and the second one studying the impact of sales/promotional effort.
+However, the following two papers do seem to propose a game theoretic analysis
+of showrooming and while they do not seem to supersede the present work, they
+should be mentioned in the related work section with a clear explanation of how
+the present work differs from them.
+
+1. Mehra, A and Kumar, S and Raju, J S (2012) Showrooming and the competition
+   between store and online retailers. In: 22nd Workshop on Information
+   Technologies and Systems, 15-16 December 2012, United States.
+
+2. Chunhua Wu, Kangkang Wang and Ting Zhu, Can Price Matching Defeat
+   Showrooming?  Manuscript, 2015
+
+Discussion of the model
+=======================
+
+The situation is modeled as a fairly standard duopoly competition where both
+retailers decide on a retail price. The original part is that the
+brick-and-mortar retailer also decides on a sales effort, a fraction of which
+contributes to increasing its own demand, while the remaining fraction
+contributes to the demand of its competitor.
+
+My main concerns regarding the model are the following:
+
+* ultimately, showrooming is a property of the consumer: the consumer decides
+  to "free-ride" the brick-and-mortar store. It seems that a proper model for
+  showrooming should also consider the consumer to be part of the game (along
+  with both retailers) and modeled as a strategic agent deciding to free-ride
+  depending on the behaviors of both retailers.
+
+* the showrooming parameter is exogenously determined. This seems to be
+  a severe limitation of the model and relates to the previous point. This
+  showrooming parameter is a coarse summary of the consumers' behavior which
+  should maybe be modeled explicitly. Furthermore, as shown in Figure 1a, the
+  main reason for showrooming are cheaper online prices, which indicates that
+  the showrooming intensity should also depend on the price difference between
+  the two retailers.
+
+* the game is solved as a Stackelberg competition where one of the two
+  retailers moves first. But in the context described in the paper, it seems
+  that both retailers can be highly dynamic and keep adjusting their prices in
+  reaction to their competitor. It seems more appropriate to analyze this
+  situation as a repeated game between the two competitors.
+
+Of lesser importance:
+
+* a motivation/explanation of why the price elasticity can be considered
+identical for both retailers would improve the exposition of the model.
+
+* similarly for the specific choice of the square root function
+to relate the sales effort to its contribution to demand. Would any other
+concave function lead to the same results? 
+
+Theoretical results
+===================
+
+The Stackelberg equilibrium is computed in closed form by a standard
+derivation. The different threshold functions defining the regions where each
+retailer experience higher demand and profit are then derived from the
+equilibrium in a straightforward manner. These results are correct as far as
+I was able to verify.
+
+Numerical analysis
+==================
+
+The numerical analysis section consists of plots of the closed-form expressions
+obtained in the theoretical section. Since everything can be solved in
+closed-form in this problem, and since most of the effects being shown are
+quite intuitive and unsurprising, the length of this section does not seem
+fully justified. I would maybe consider removing Figure 2 and merging Figure
+3 and Figure 4 into one figure. This would put more emphasis on the one
+counter-intuitive finding that high levels of showrooming do not benefit the
+online retailer.
+
+Strategic decision-making
+=========================
+
+Section 6 aims at providing managerial insights coming from the theoretical and
+numerical results. However, a significant drawback is that the optimal strategy
+strongly depends on the level of showrooming which is assumed exogenous in the
+paper. This leaves the following question completely open: how as a retailer
+can I determine which level of showrooming (and thus which cell of the array)
+I am in? Without some indication that the level of showrooming could be
+determined (for example estimated from data), the impact of the managerial
+insights coming from this model is significantly lessened.
+
+This section could also contain some analysis of real-life data: different
+strategies followed by different retailers and which ones had a positive
+impact. For example, the famous Bestbuy price-matching policy which has been
+studied in the related literature could be analyzed in light of the theory
+developed in this paper.
+
+The meaning of the VL, L, H, VH strategies in table 2 and 3 should be
+explained: how where the thresholds defining these different categories
+determined?
+
+Click-and-mortar model
+======================
+
+Section 7 is lacking some important details on how the results were obtained.
+My understanding is that the authors solved for the Stackelberg equilibrium in
+the new setting where the brick-and-mortar retailer nows sells via an extra
+online channel. If this is the case it should be written clearly.
+
+An alternative interpretation of this section could be that deciding to open an
+online store is now a strategic action that can be taken by the
+brick-and-mortar retailer, whether or not to take this action is part of the
+description of the equilirium.
+
+Without such an explanation, the reader cannot determined how Figure 6 was
+obtained: what is the equation of the boundary between zone 1 and zone 2 in
+each plot?
+
+Comments on writing
+===================
+
+Apart from the specific comments on exposition given in the previous sections,
+I found the paper very well written and easy to follow. Two minor typos
+I found:
+
+* page 6, first paragraph of section 2: interations --> interactions
+* page 26 last paragraph, 3rd sentence: motor --> mortar
+
+Conclusion
+==========
+
+While the problem of formally understanding showrooming is very interesting and
+mostly unexplored by the current literature, the model adopted in this paper
+suffers from questionable choices. The fact that the results are not confronted
+to real world examples and depend on a key parameter (showrooming intensity)
+which seems hard to determine also diminishes the impact of this work.