We explore the managerial implications and economic consequences of platform sharing under models of horizontal and vertical product differentiation. By using a common platform across different products, firms can save on fixed costs for platform development. At the same time, platform sharing...

This paper examines how to evaluate consumer welfare when consumers face nonlinear prices. This problem arises in many settings, such as devising optimal pricing strategies for firms, assessing how price discrimination affects consumers, and evaluating the efficiency costs of many transfer...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the extent of producer heterogeneity in the output market by analyzing output price and price-marginal cost markups at the plant level for thirteen homogenous manufactured goods. It relies on micro data from the U.S. Census of Manufactures over the...

This paper studies a unique panel dataset of transactions with repeat customers of an insurer operating in a market in which insurers are not required by law or contract to share information about their customers' records. I use this dataset to test the asymmetric learning hypothesis that...

Cigarettes are experience goods - most of their utility value only gets revealed when one consumes them. We hypothesize a three phase consumer life cycle for experience goods. Consumers initially do not know their utility from the good or their preferences for particular characteristics, and may...

We use detailed micro data to document a causal response of local retail price to changes in house prices, with elasticities of 15%-20% across housing booms and busts. Notably, these price responses are largest in zip codes with many homeowners, and non-existent in zip codes with mostly renters....

In this paper we measure the effect of year to year changes in the weather on wine prices and winery revenue in the Mosel Valley in Germany in order to determine the effect that climate change is likely to have on the income of wine growers. A novel aspect of our analysis is that we compare the...

In early 2003, France actively tried to thwart the plans of the Bush administration to build international support for a war to depose Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein. In response, calls in the United States for a boycott of French products, wine in particular, rebounded through all forms of media....

The ready-to-eat cereal industry is characterized by high concentration margins, large advertising to sales ratios, and numerous introductions of new products. Previous researchers have concluded that the ready-to-eat cereal industry is a classic example of an industry with nearly collusive...

In this paper we propose a method to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S. horizontal merger policy and apply it to the study of five recent consumer product mergers. We selected the mergers from those that, from the public record, seemed to be most problematic for the antitrust agencies. Thus we...