We introduce avoidable fixed costs into the capacity and entry model of Dixit (1980) to produce a coordination problem among multiple postentry equilibria. Elimination of weakly dominated strategies makes it possible for the entrant to play a knockout strategy, consisting of a large capacity...

We show that when relevant market information such as price is difficult to communicate, advertising plays a key role in bringing about optimal coordination of purchase behavior: an efficient firm uses advertising expenditures in place of price to inform sophisticated consumers that it offers a...

We consider communication of quality via cheap talk and dissipative advertising, when consumers have heterogeneous tastes for quality. For search goods, cheap talk communicates quality when fixed costs are roughly constant across quality levels, while if fixed costs vary greatly with quality,...

We consider the role of repeat business in resolving the paradox of Diamond (1971). In each period, consumers engage in sequential price search at a positive search cost. Consumers enforce pricing discipline via a simple loyalty-boycott search rule that directs future-period seraches away from...

We introduce a model of the retail firm in which consumers and active firms benefit collectively from coordination of sales at fewer firms. Using this model, we show that ostensibly uninformative advertising plays a key role in bringing about coordination economies, by directing consumer search...

We show that when avoidable fixed costs are introduced into the capacity-and-entry model of Dixit(1980) and Ware(1984), there arises a coordination problem in selecting among postentry Nash equilibria. Elimination of weakly dominated strategies makes it possible for the entrant to us a...

This paper considers pricing, cost-reducing investment and dissipative advertising by firms when consumers acquire price information via two information channels, observation of advertising and sequential price search. We find that advertising guides consumers to the lowest prices in the market,...

In this paper, we study the short-run and long-run comovement between prices and real activity in the G7 countries during the postwar period using vector autoregressive systems and frequency-domain filters. We find several patterns that are robust across countries and time periods. Typically,...

This paper develops a model with multiple steady states (low tax and unemployment rate versus high tax and unemployment rate) in which equilibrium selection is not conditioned on a sunspot variable. Instead, large enough shocks initiate unavoidable transitions from one regime to the other. The...