We investigate the effect of an EU-wide consumer protection regulation on consumer trust as well as consumer behavior. The Unfair Commercial Practice Directive (UCPD) was implemented by EU member states between 2007 and 2010. We utilize data from the Special and Flash Eurobarometer for the years...

This paper studies obfuscation decisions by firms in retail financial markets theoretically and experimentally. We show that more prominent firms are more likely to obfuscate. While prominent firms always choose maximum obfuscation, the obfuscation by less prominent firms depends on the degree...

We investigate whether online travel agents (OTAs) assign hotels worse positions in their search results if these set lower hotel prices at other OTAs or on their own websites. We formally characterize how an OTA can use such a strategy to reduce price differentiation across distribution...

This paper explores how consumers react towards price differentiation between on-net and off-net calls in mobile telecommunications - a pricing policy that is common in many mobile telecommunications markets. Based on a survey of 1044 students we demonstrate that some consumers may suffer from a...

This paper investigates why consumers choose calling plans that are not always cost-minimizing. Our approach is twofold: we account for general difficulties facing a tariff choice, as well as for biased preferences. We provide evidence from an experiment among German university students and...

This paper studies the relationship between transparency on the consumer side and productivity of firms. We show that more transparent markets are characterized by higher average productivity as firms with low productivity abstain from entering these markets. -- Market Transparency ; Firm...

We analyze how consumer preferences for one-stop shopping affect the bargaining relationship 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...

It is increasingly observable that competitors in different industries share customer data, which can be used for targeted pricing. We propose a modified Hotelling model with two-dimensional consumer heterogeneity to analyze the incentives for such sharing and its ensuing welfare effects. We...

The increasing usage of mobile communication and the declining demand for fixed line telephony in Europe make the analysis of substitutional effects between fixed and mobile networks a key aspect for future telecommunication regulation. Using a unique dataset which contains information on all 27...

I explore the competitive effects of on-net/off-net differentiation in a market with two asymmetric networks by combining the literature on on-net/off-net differentiation with research on costly consumer search in an agent-based simulation model. All consumers in the market are subscribed to one...