There is convincing evidence that the Internet has lowered the prices paid by some consumers in established industries, for example, term life insurance and car retailing. However, current research does not reveal much about how using the Internet lowers prices. This paper answers this question...

The number of different car and light truck models produced in North America has increased enormously over the last decades. The data suggests that producing this increased variety of vehicles is associated with a productivity penalty. We show that manufacturers can adopt complementary...

High-quality producers in a vertically differentiated market can reap superior profits by charging higher prices, selling greater quantities, or both. If qualities are known by consumers and production costs are constant, then having a higher quality secures the producer both higher price and...

During the summer of 2005, the Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers offered a customer promotion that allowed customers to buy new cars at the discounted price formerly offered only to employees. The initial months of the promotion were record sales months for each of the Big Three firms,...

Automobile manufacturers make frequent use of promotions that give cash-back payments. Two common types of cash-back promotions are rebates to customers, which are widely publicized to potential customers, and discounts to dealers, which are not publicized. While the payments nominally go...

This paper studies the within-model-year pricing and production of new automobiles. Using new monthly data on U.S. transaction prices, we document that for the typical new vehicle, prices fall over the model year at a 9.2 percent annual rate. Concurrently, both sales and inventories are hump...

Product redesigns happen across virtually all types of products. While there is substantial evidence that new varieties of goods increase welfare, there is little evidence on the effect of product redesigns. We develop a model of redesign and exit decisions in a dynamic oligopoly model (a la...

Can directed technical change be used to combat climate change? We construct new firm-level panel data on auto industry innovation distinguishing between "dirty" (internal combustion engine) and "clean" (e.g. electric and hybrid) patents across 80 countries over several decades. We show that...

We document a strong correlation in the brand of automobile chosen by parents and their adult children, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. This correlation could represent transmission of brand preferences across generations, or it could result from correlation in family...

This paper analyzes "attribute-based regulations," in which regulatory compliance depends upon some secondary attribute that is not the intended target of the regulation. For example, in many countries fuel-economy standards mandate that vehicles have a certain fuel economy, but heavier or...