Firms frequently compete across multiple segments. Such multimarket contact has been shown to deter aggressive competition, leading to what has been termed quot;mutual forbearance.quot; Empirical support for this phenomenon derives mainly from studies of the direct effects of multimarket contact...

We introduce the concept of consumer options and empirically validate it in the context of event ticket pricing. We demonstrate that consumer options can protect consumers from the downside related to uncertain outcomes, and enhance seller profits by enabling superior market segmentation and...