The authors 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, the authors show that ostensibly uninformative advertising plays a key role in bringing about coordination economies by directing...

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,...

When market information such as price is difficult to communicate, consumers and firms may be unable to take advantage of mutually beneficial scale economies so that coordination failures arise. Ostensibly uninformative advertising expenditures can be used to eliminate coordination failures by...

When avoidable fixed costs are introduced into the entry model of Dixit (1980) and Ware (1984), there arises a coordination problem in selecting among postentry Nash equilibria. Elimination of weakly dominated strategies allows the entrant to use a market-capturing strategy, consisting of a...

We expand Milgrom and Roberts' (1982) limit pricing model to allow for multiple incumbents. Each incumbent is informed as to the level of an industry cost parameter and selects a preentry price while a single entrant observes each incumbent's preentry price. We find that incumbents are unable to...

We develop a model of retail competition in which retailers select prices and investments in cost reduction. An equilibrium is constructed in which several identical firms enter and then engage in a phase of vigorous price competition. This phase is concluded with a "shakeout," as a low-price,...

We enrich Milgrom and Roberts' (1982) limit-pricing model to allow an incumbent to signal his costs with both price and advertisements. Our fundamental result is that a cost-reducing distortion occurs, in that the incumbent behaves as if there were complete information but his costs were lower...

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...