Many firms divide the price a consumer pays for a good into two pieces---the price for the item itself and the price for shipping and handling. With fully rational customers, the exact division between the two prices is irrelevant---only the total price matters. We test this hypothesis by...

The market structure of platform competition is critically important to managers and policy makers. Network effects in these markets predict concentrated industry structures, whereas competitive effects and differentiation suggest the opposite. Standard theory offers little guidance — full...

Platform competition is ubiquitous, yet platform market structure is little understood. Theory models typically suffer from equilibrium multiplicity--platforms might coexist or the market might tip to either platform. We use laboratory experiments to study the outcomes of platform competition....

The recent theoretical literature suggests that consumer myopia may lead firms to profitably suppress or shroud some attributes of the price. Empirical and experimental data also suggest that sellers gain by transferring a larger fraction of the price to the shrouded attributes. However,...