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...

We investigate how costly acquisition and exchange of customer-specific information affects industry profit and consumer welfare. Consumers differ in their preferences for competing brands and in their switching costs between brands. Brand-producing firms use their acquired knowledge of...

We introduce three types of consumer recognition: identity recognition, asymmetric preference recognition, and symmetric preference recognition. We characterize price equilibria and compare profits, consumer surplus, and total welfare. Asymmetric preference recognition enhances profits compared...

This paper quantifi es the effects of drug monopolies and low per-capita income on pharmaceutical prices in developing economies using the example of the antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) used to treat HIV. -- intellectual property rights ; international price discrimination ; TRIPS agreement ;...

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...

This paper examines optimal managerial decisions in markets where goods may be distributed directly by their producers and/or by an intermediary akin to an online platform. We characterize the optimal design of the platforms' trading strategy, under two distinct business models: a marketplace...

Manufacturers frequently post non-binding public price recommendations, but neither the rationale for this practice nor its impact on prices is well understood. I develop a model in which recommendations signal a manufacturer's production cost to searching consumers, who then form beliefs about...

Understanding the degree of cannibalization and competition in online and offline markets is important to firms' product line designs. However, few empirical studies have measured both effects simultaneously or have examined the factors that determine the extent of cannibalization and...

We consider a monopoly that sets a price and differentiated referral fees to spread product information along a simple consumer communication network (a chain). The profit-maximizing solution involves standard monopoly pricing and referral fees that provide consumers with strictly positive...

We study a game in which two firms compete in quality to serve a market consisting of consumers with different initial consideration sets. If both firms invest below a certain threshold, they only compete for those consumers already aware of their existence. Above this threshold, a firm is...