This paper analyzes the welfare consequences of bundling different risks in one insurance contract in markets where adverse selection is important. This question is addressed in the context of a competitive insurance model a la Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) with two sources of risk....

The unraveling argument says that when a rm may produce dierent qualities and quality is unknown to consumers, the rm has an incentive to disclose the private information as in any pool of rms there is a best quality rm and this rm has an incentive to disclose. Recent literature has established...

The well-known double marginalization problem understates the inefficiencies arising from vertical relations in consumer search markets where consumers are uninformed about the wholesale prices charged by manufacturers to retailers. Con- sumer search provides a monopoly manufacturer with an...

We study vertical relations in markets with consumer and retailer search. Retailers search to learn manufacturers' prices. We obtain three important new results. First, we explain why empirical distributions of retail prices are bi- modal, with a regular price and a sales price. Second, under...

A large variety of markets, such as retail markets for gasoline or mortgage markets, are characterized by a small number of firms offering a fairly homogenous product at virtually the same cost, while consumers, being uninformed about this cost, sequentially search for low prices. The present...

When consumers search sequentially for prices and product matches, their beliefs of what they will encounter at the next rm are important in deciding whether or not to continue to search. In search environments where retailers have a common cost that is not known to consumers and is either the...

This paper shows that the double marginalization problem signicantly underestimates the ineciencies arising from vertical relations in markets where consumers who are uninformed about the wholesale arrangements be- tween manufacturers and retailers search for the best retail price. Consumer...