The paper deals with the competitive effects of price guarantees in a spatial duopoly where consumers can search for lower prices but have to incur hassle costs if they want to claim a price guarantee. It is shown that symmetric equilibria with and without price guarantees exist but price...

It is increasingly observable that in different industries competitors jointly acquire and share customer data. We propose a modified Hotelling model with two-dimensional consumer heterogeneity to analyze the incentives for such agreements and their welfare implications. In our model the...

A sizable literature has grown up in recent years focusing on two-sided markets in which economies of scale combined with complementarities between a platform and its associated ‘software’ or ‘services’ can generate indirect network effects (that is positive feedback between the number...

Practising is a matter of increasing the reliability of ones skills rather than relying on a tool or a strike of genius to get it right. Once perfection has been achieved the individual will aim for higher quality since the effort is more likely to be worthwhile. Furthermore because the returns...

This paper considers the impact of reviewers on the sale of a product of unknown quality. Sales occur simultaneously after an initial review by an unbiased, pessimistic or optimistic reviewer and we examine the impact on sales in each case. We find that counter-intuitively a pessimistic reviewer...

In recent years, a number of empirical studies and energy regulators have applied benchmarking techniques to measure the efficiency and performance of network utilities. An important issue has been the extent to which such results are influenced by contextual factors. Among these, weather...

The standard simple sequential herding model is altered to allow a firm with a new product to have it reviewed publicly before launch. Reviewers are either inherently pessimistic, optimistic or unbiased. We find the counter-intuitive result that a firm with a good product will prefer a...

This paper studies the interaction of information disclosure and reputational concerns in certification markets. We argue that by revealing less precise information a certifier reduces the threat of capture. Opaque disclosure rules may reduce profits but also constrain feasible bribes. For large...

This papers studies the effects on service quality and consumer surplus of a minimum price which is fixed by a bureaucratic non-monopolistic professional association. It shows that the price floor set by a Niskanen-type professional assocation will maximize consumer surplus only if consumers...