This paper explores how social interactions among consumers shape markets. In a two-country model, consumers meet and exchange information about the quality of the goods. As information spreads, the demands evolve, affecting the prices and quantities manufactured by profit-maximizing firms. We...

Search engines face an interesting tradeoff in choosing the way to display their results. While providing high quality unpaid, or “left side” results attracts users, doing so can also cannibalize the revenue that comes from paid ads on the “right side”. This paper examines this tradeoff,...

The paper studies the impact of homophily on the optimal strategies of a monopolist, whose marketing campaign of new product relies on a word of mouth communication. Homophily is a tendency of people to interact more with those who are similar to them. In the model there are two types of...

The paper studies the impact of homophily on the optimal strategies of a monopolist, whose marketing campaign of new product relies on a word of mouth communication. Homophily is a tendency of people to interact more with those who are similar to them. In the model there are two types of...

I develop a model of rent seeking with informational foundations and an arbitrary number of rent seekers, and I compare the results with Tullock's (1980) classic model where the influence activities are "black-boxed." Given the microfoundations, the welfare consequences of rent seeking can be...

To explain the spatial selection of vertically di fferentiated firms, this paper incorporates heterogeneous preferences and heterogeneous quality productions into a framework of the footloose capital model, in which labor is immobile. In two regions with identical population size, when trade...

Household finances are confidential and discussions are limited to a subset of peers. We collect representative survey data to examine whether interactions with inner and outer social circles influence return perceptions, expectations, and exposure to a widely known financial instrument in a...

In this paper, we tackle the dilemma of pruning versus proliferation in a vertically differentiated oligopoly under the assumption that some firms collude and control both the range of variants for sale and their corresponding prices, likewise a multiproduct firm. We analyse whether pruning...

The law and economics literature on the tragedy of the anticommons suggests that producers of complementary goods should integrate themselves. Recent decisions by the antitrust authorities seem to indicate that there is tradeoff between the “tragedy” and the lack of competition which might...