The purpose of this paper is to investigate how socially concerned consumers' preferences affects firms' decisions to commit to social responsibility. In a market in which firms face the same demand function and products are homogeneous, we find that a large group of socially concerned consumers...

The failure of competition and the consequent high and sticky interest rates in credit card markets have been the subject of a considerable amount of debate and research lately. This paper presents the first regression testing for the existence of price competition in a credit card market to be...

This paper studies market competition when firms can influence consumers' ability to compare market alternatives, through their choice of price "formats". We introduce random graphs as a tool for modelling limited comparability of formats. Our main results concern the interaction between firms'...

Behavioural and industrial economists have argued that, because of cognitive limitations, consumers are liable to make sub-optimal choices in complex decision problems. Firms can exploit these limitations by introducing spurious complexity into tariff structures, weakening price competition....

This paper proposes a model in which identical sellers of a homogenous product compete in both prices and price frames (i.e., ways to present price information). We model price framing by assuming that firms’ frame choices affect the comparability of their price offers: consumers may fail to...

Mullainathan, Schwartzstein, & Shleifer [Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2008] put forward a model of coarse thinking. The essential idea behind coarse thinking is that agents put situations into categories and then apply the same model of inference to all situations in a given category. We...