The establishment of an asking, or ceiling, price from which reductions can be bargained is a common selling practice. For a monopolist seller of a single object, this article characterizes the best such ceiling price and shows that its use is optimal among all incentive-compatible mechanisms in...

In a discrete choice model of product differentiation, the symmetric duopoly price may be lower than, equal to, or higher than the single-product monopoly price. Whereas the market share effect encourages a duopolist to charge less than the monopoly price because a duopolist serves fewer...

Oligopoly price discrimination in the retail market prevents a manufacturer from inducing optimal retail margins through any wholesale price. This motivates the manufacturer to impose resale price maintenance. In a model of third-degree price discrimination by rival retailers, a retail price...

This article develops a theory of dynamic pricing in which firms may offer separate prices to different consumers based on their past purchases. Brand preferences over two periods are described by a copula admitting various degrees of positive dependence. When commitment to future prices is...

This article offers a new explanation of why firms diversify. I present a model in which a firm has private information about both its own cost and the demand function of the market on which it competes with another firm. I show that diversification can be used by the informed firm to signal...

It is well known that vertical integration cats change the pricing incentive of an upstream producer. However, it has not been noticed that vertical integration may also change the pricing incentive of downstream producer and the incentive of a competitor in choosing input suppliers. I develop...

We develop a symmetric-information auction model of multiproject contracting with costly bidding and increasing marginal performance costs. When there are many potential contractors or only one job, there is a zero-expected-profit symmetric equilibrium in mixed strategies. The winning bid at...

We explore a dynamic, competitive model for experience goods and study an equilibrium for it in which firms plan initially to produce high quality at low price, then high quality at high price, then low quality at high price. Each consumer is aware that all firms eventually intend to run down...