Laitinen (1980) derives an input allocation model for a multiproduct firm that first maximizes revenue and second maximizes profit. While theoretically elegant, the model has never been formulated empirically because of the complexity of the model’s price-deflated terms. This paper derives the...

We examine retailer heterogeneity in price adjustment in UK supermarkets. Considerable variation in the price change frequency of identically bar-coded products among retail chains is found. Decomposition analysis suggests that price adjustment is evenly split between sales and reference prices...

This paper studies the impact of relative performance evaluation (RPE) on the equilibrium locations in a Hotelling model with quadratic transportation cost. It is shown that equilibrium location varies from maximum differentiation to minimum differentiation, depending upon the relative strength...

Random choices of prices and product characteristics can be used by a contestable monopolist to deter entry and fully extract the monopoly rent. We develop this idea in a model of Bertrand price competition. In equilibrium, one firm enters the market and makes choices that are unpredictable to...

Myopic consumers underestimate the likelihood with which they will require follow-on services for products they purchase. Firms have an incentive to exploit this behavioral bias by skewing their price structure toward high add-on charges. Inadvertently, this skewed price structure provides...

Existing hedonic methods cannot be easily adapted to estimate willingness to pay for product characteristics when willingness to pay depends on a very large basket of goods. We show how to marry these methods with revealed preference arguments to estimate bounds on willingness to pay using data...

Current Department of Justice merger guidelines assume that merging the capacities of two firms will translate into an equivalent increase in market shares. Size matters. Economic theory asserts size is determined by marginal revenue and marginal cost not capacity. Size does not matter. In this...

The two central pricing rules contained in most antitrust laws are prohibitions of below-cost pricing and prohibitions of discriminatory pricing. This article shows that the rule against discriminatory pricing may actually induce firms to charge exclusionary below-cost prices, even in the...

I show that marginal cost asymmetry has important implications for search models. In several widely used search models with mixed strategy equilibria, excluding some special cases, firms with different marginal costs cannot randomize prices in the same interval. So, even a small asymmetry in...

Harrington (2004) shows that conspirators can have incentives to maintain high prices after the cartel’s discovery to reduce damages they are likely to pay. We exploit the existence of a discovered retail gasoline price-fixing cartel in the province of Quebec to test this theory. The empirical...