In their seminal paper, Grossman and Shapiro (1984) assume that it is not profitable for a firm to deviate to the supercompetitive price of Salop (1979). In this paper, it is shown that this assumption is violated if, roughly, each firm reaches less than half of all consumers unless it is a...

This paper examines one of the most important marketing strategies by software producers on the Internet. That is whether to offer free samples and if so, whether to list the samples on shareware repositories. I show that firms with higher value products have a greater incentive to offer free...

We consider a market in which firms can partially observe each consumer's search behavior in the market. In our main model, a firm knows whether a consumer is visiting it for the first time or whether she is returning after a previous visit. Firms have an incentive to offer a lower price on a...

In this paper, we analyze the careers from a sample of more than 1,000 top French chefs over more than twenty years and link it to the success or reputation of the restaurants where they have worked. This allows us to test what are the determinants of success but also to investigate the dynamics...

We study how much information firms include in their advertisements and what determines their choices. We use data from advertisement videos from the US OTC analgesics industry between 2001 and 2005 to measure information content in ads. For each video we code the number of cues it contains. The...

Using the dietary supplement black cohosh to demonstrate our method, we employ data on a product characteristic unobservable to consumers to decompose the contribution to consumers’ valuations of observable characteristics into surrogate indicator and direct components. Because consumers are...

The present study constructs a decision support system to determine the best seeding rate out of a group of seeding rates applied in the field. The DSS has been built receives the field data as inputs, and then apply split plot algorithms of (Gomez & Gomez, 1984) to find the results. These...

We endogenize product differentiation in a model of sequential search with random firm-consumer match value à la Wolinsky (1986) and Anderson and Renault (1999). We focus on a product design choice by which a firm can control the dispersion of consumer valuations for its product; we interpret...

This paper analyzes the welfare impact of a cap on commissions paid by product providers to intermediaries who advise consumers. In contrast to the extant literature, with a downward sloping demand capped commissions have a direct impact on product providers' margins and consumers' prices. I...