There have been many claims that the Internet represents a nearly frictionless market. This paper extends the empirical results on online retailing by studying prices for nearly homogenous services - holiday packages - matched across conventional and Internet channels. On first sight, lower...

A large, mature and robust economic literature on pay for performance now exists, whichprovides a useful framework for thinking about pay for performance systems. I use thelessons of the literature to discuss how to design and implement pay for performance inpractice....

This paper evaluates alternative strategic models of competition and market structure inonline retailing, and makes comparisons with traditional retailing. Online consumers areless concerned than traditional consumers about spatial characteristics and moreconcerned about hidden quality...

Intellectual property rights are legal constraints that limit entry in industries where incumbentsare innovators. The set of legal constraints is the same for all industries, withoutconsidering that the externalities created by entry are not necessarily negative for the incumbentor that the...

Despite the empirical relevance of advertising strategies in concentrated markets,the economics literature is largely silent on the effect of persuasive advertisingstrategies on pricing, market structure and increasing (or decreasing) dominance.In a simple model of persuasive advertising and...

This paper presents an industry equilibrium model of vertical integration under contractualimperfections with speci…c input suppliers and external investors. I assume that vertical inte-gration economizes on the needs for contracts with speci…c input suppliers at the cost of higher…xed costs....

This paper analyses the implications of bargaining between buyers and sellers on the competitive outcome in a homogeneous good industry. Bargaining creates a competitive equilibrium in which some inefficient sellers coexist with efficient leading to productivity dispersion...

List prices are not completely credible as take it or leave it prices: buyers are able to seek reductions by bargaining with firms. We show that this realisation leads to the existence of a critical threshold number of competitors in an industry which depends on fundamentals. In industries with...

This paper analyses how competition over rebates for customer loyalty across product lines affects firms` pricing and consumers generally. If buyers incur firm specific costs or have shop specific tastes then competitive loyalty discounts lower consumer surplus overall and raise profits - the...

Firms selling multiple quality-differentiated products frequently alter theirproduct lines when a competitor enters the market. We present a model of multiproductmonopoly and duopoly using a general “upgrades” approach that yields a powerfulanalytical framework. We provide a simple...