This paper provides a new and simple model of endogenous horizontal product differentiation based on a standard demand structure derived from quadratic utility. One objective of the paper is to explain the "empirical Bertrand paradox" - the failure to observe homogeneous product Bertrand...

This paper studies how market competition influences the algorithmic design choices of firms in the context of targeting. Firms face the general trade-off between bias and variance when choosing the design of a supervised learning algorithm in terms of model complexity or the number of...

This paper explores how different margins of market share are related to markups. Using merged microdata on producers and consumers, we document that a firm's market share is mainly related to its number of customers, while its price-cost markup is associated only with its average sales per...

We study specialized lending in a credit market competition model with private information. Two banks, equipped with similar data processing systems, possess "general" signals regarding the borrower's quality. However, the specialized bank gains an additional advantage through further...

Nearly half of all transactions in the $5 trillion market for manufactured goods in the United States were intermediated by wholesalers in 2012, up from 32 percent in 1992. Seventy percent of this increase is due to the growth of "superstar" firms - the largest one percent of wholesalers....

Empirical studies have found that enhanced foreign competition can encourage or discourage innovation. To address this relationship, I examine a market structure in which a small number of large multi-product oligopolists compete with a large number of small single-product firms in the same...

I derive a formula for the equilibrium distribution of markups in the search- theoretic model of imperfect competition of Butters (1977), Varian (1980), and Burdett and Judd (1983). The level of markups and the sign of the relationship between a seller's markup and its size depends on the extent...

The purpose of this paper is to understand the effects of endogenous markups and trade costs on the pricing behavior of exporters when firms are heterogeneous in productivity. Using new analytical distributions for markups under Bertrand competition, we uncover Ricardian patterns of export...

The United States and other nations rely on consumer choice and price competition among competing health plans to allocate resources in the health sector. A great deal of research has examined the efficiency consequences of adverse selection in health insurance markets, less attention has been...