This paper studies quality choice in a model where consumers expect firms (or brands) to act altruistically. Under plausible assumptions regarding this altruism and the reaction of consumers to firms that demonstrate insufficient altruism, existing brands can face a larger demand for new...

A model is considered where firms internalize the regret costs that consumers experience when they see an unexpected price change. Regret costs are assumed to be increasing in the size of price changes and this can explain why the size of price increases is less sensitive to inflation than in...

This paper presents a model in which firms recruit both unemployed and employed workers by posting vacancies. Firms act monopsonistically and set wages to retain their existing workers as well as to attract new ones. The model differs from Burdett and Mortensen (1998) in that its assumptions...

This paper considers a specific factor model with two sectors in which agents are altruistic towards domestic residents. I show that, even if the degree of altruism is small, direct democracy leads to commercial policies that are biased against trade as long as the mobile factor is unbiased in...

Why are higher quality niches seen as intrinsically more profitable in business circles? Why do high quality products sometimes have a low real price, while it is unusual to see low quality products with high real prices? Can markets have quality differentiation as well as quality bunching? In...

Thereare three points made in this paper. The first is that the question concerning choice of a product line by a monopolist is similar in structure to other adverse selection problems -- and can be analyzed in an elementary way by adapting techniques recently developed for such problems. Such...

We develop a new model of quality to capture the idea that even if a customer chooses to purchase a product, it may fail to deliver.' In this event, the customer may wish to choose some other product. We model this as a two stage game where firms first choose quality and then price. We find that...

This paper starts by discussing consumers' cognitive and emotional reaction to posted prices. Cognitively, some consumers do not appear to make effective use of price information to maximize their consumption-based utility. Emotionally, prices can induce regret and anger among consumers. The...

I suppose that consumers see a firm as fair if they cannot reject the hypothesis that the firm is somewhat benevolent towards them. Consumers that can reject this hypothesis become angry, which is costly to the firm. I show that firms that wish to avoid this anger will keep their prices rigid...

If changes in aggregate demand were an important source of macroeconomic fluctuations, real wages would be countercyclical unless markups of price over marginal cost were themselves countercyclical. We thus examine three theories of markup variation at cyclical frequencies. The first assumes...