We explore the strategic role of private quality standards in food supply chains. Considering two symmetric retailers that are exclusively supplied by a finite number of producers and endogenizing the suppliers' delivery choice, we show that there exist two asymmetric equilibria in the...

We provide a novel intuition for why manufacturers restrict their retailers' ability to resell brandproducts online. Our approach builds on models of limited attention according to which pricedisparities across distribution channels guide a consumer's attention toward prices and lower...

We show that the rise in ebook prices following Apple's entry into the market can be explained by Amazon's Kindle device losing its essential position. When consumers began accessing Amazon's ebooks using third-party devices, such as the iPad, Amazon's incentive to keep ebook prices low...

When Apple entered the ebook market, prices rose. A recent court decision found Apple guilty of colluding with publishers, blaming the price hike, in part, on agency agreements and prohibiting their use. Building a model to compare these with traditional wholesale agreements, we identify a...

We study zero-rating, a practice whereby an Internet service provider (ISP) that limits retail data consumption exempts certain content from that limit. This practice is particularly controversial when an ISP zero-rates its own vertically integrated content, because the data limit and ensuing...

Building on the seminal paper of Ordover, Saloner and Salop (1990), I study the role of reputation building on foreclosure in laboratory experiments. In one-shot interactions, upstream firms can choose to build a reputation by revealing their price history to the current upstream competitor. In...

Considering a vertical structure with perfectly competitive upstream firms that deliver a homogenous good to a differentiated retail duopoly, we show that upstream fixed costs may help to monopolize the downstream market. We find that downstream prices increase in upstream firms' fixed costs...

We analyze how consumer preferences for one-stop shopping a¤ect the (Nash) bargaining relationships between a retailer and its suppliers. One-stop shopping preferences create demand complementarities among otherwise independent products which lead to two opposing effects on upstream merger...

We analyze the best price clauses (BPCs) of online travel agents (OTAs) using meta-search price data of nearly 30,000 hotels in different countries. We find that BPCs influence the pricing and availability of hotel rooms across online sales channels. In particular, hotels publish their offers...

When an upstream monopolist supplies several competing downstreamfirms, it may fail to monopolize the market because it is unable to commit not to behave opportunistically. We build on previous experimental studies of this well-known commitment problem by introducing communication. Allowing the...