The imposition of universal coverage and uniform pricing constraints, as part of the universalservice obligations, makes the universal service provider less aggressive in the price game when itcompetes with a firm that does not cover the whole set of markets (Valletti et al., 2002). In...

Especially in many online markets, consumers can readily observe prices, but may need to further inspect products to assess their suitability. We study the effects of product differentiation and search costs on competition and market outcomes in a tractable model of price-directed consumer...

We define a two-variant model of product differentiation which, depending on the number of consumersprefering one variant to the other, provides equilibrium prices reflecting the natural valuation of thesevariants by the market....

This paper analyses price competition under product differentiation when goods are defined ina two dimensional characteristic space, and consumers do not know which firm sells whichquality. Equilibrium prices consist of two additive terms, which balance consumers' relativevaluation of goods'...

Minimum quality standards (MQS) constitute an important regulatory tool that can be used to raise product qualities, to benefit consumers and to increase market participation. One of the main assumptions in the existing literature is that firms must comply with standards. Nevertheless, in many...

There is widespread evidence that geographical borders reduce trade. This paper presents a theoretical model capable of providing a succinct comparison of three broad forms of trade barriers involving i) trade costs, ii) localized tastes, and iii) information frictions. Despite being...

In many markets, firms offering low-quality goods are more prominent than firms offering high-quality goods. Then, consumers are perfectly informed about the good of the prominent low-quality firm but incur search costs to bring the high-quality good of a competitor to mind. We analyze under...

We show in a simple model of entry with sunk cost, that a regulator prefers limiting the output, orcapacity, of the incumbent firm rather than imposing a “Minimum Quality Standard” in order tohelp the entrant to provide high quality. As a by-product, our analysis makes a contribution to...

We show the incentive for divisionalization by a monopolist producer. Incontrast to the previous literature, where divisionalization occurs for product marketadvantage, we show that divisionalization occurs if it provides strategic advantage inthe labor market. With unionized labor market, we...