We study the impact a redistribution of income has on the decisions of a health care innovator and the utility of consumers. We find that income redistribution from rich to poor increases the quality of the medical innovation, reduces its price and increases the utility of some of the consumers...

Third-party sellers in online marketplaces provide wide product/service variety and are highly heterogeneous in the capability of delivering value to buyers. Seller variety and value heterogeneity shape seller competition, which then affects the marketplace owner’s profit. This paper presents...

The existing literature on mergers in durable goods industries suggests that such mergers will produce much less harm to consumer welfare in the first few years following the merger than mergers in non-durable goods industries, particularly if the pre-merger stock can be kept in service for a...

This paper examines the tension between competition for the customer and competition in the market in a differentiated-product oligopoly. Consumers make purchases through an exclusive supply relationship that is modeled as a discrete-continuous choice problem. We characterize Bertrand-Nash...

There appears to be universal agreement that antitrust policy should "protect competition, not competitors" and that consumer welfare is the fundamental standard for evaluating competitive effects. There is considerable debate, however, about how to implement those principles in practice when...

Can heuristic information processing affect important product markets? We explore whether the tendency to focus on the left-most digit of a number affects how used car buyers incorporate odometer values in their purchase decisions. Analyzing over 22 million wholesale used-car transactions, we...

In many industries, firms reward their customers for making referrals. We analyze the optimal policy mix of price, advertising intensity, and referral fee for a monopoly when buyers choose to what extent to refer other consumers to the firm. We find that the firm uses its referral fee, but not...

Jun and Kim (2008) consider the optimal pricing and referral strategy of a monopoly that uses a consumer communication network to spread product information. They show that for any finite referral chain, the optimal policy involves a referral fee that provides strictly positive referral...

Although revenue-management markets are rarely monopolistic, this assumption is typically made in the literature. In this paper, multiple sellers in total offer K identical goods to nK buyers with private persistent valuations. Goods are traded in continuous time before some deadline. All buyers...