This paper studies the relationship between horizontal product differentiation and the welfare effects of third-degree price discrimination in oligopoly. By deriving linear demand from a representative consumer´s utility and focusing on the symmetric equilibrium of a pricing game, we...

When firms' shrouding of charges, as in Gabaix and Laibson (2006), meets with consumers' salient thinking, as in Bordalo et al. (2013), this can have severe welfare implications. The ensuing excessive competition for headline prices tends to inefficiently bias consumers' choice towards...

Revisions incorporated into the Horizontal Merger Guidelines in 2010 claim that the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission consider anticompetitive effects to product “variety” when evaluating mergers. The Guidelines do not, however, explain the methodology or tools that can...

This study analyzes the impact of a brand name change in the forms of a business name change. Specifically the name change of a successful store in Cartagena de Indias Colombia is examined. Lopez and Benlloch (2005) argue that trademark/trade-name positively impacts the generation of confidence...

In recent years, some Canadian politicians and powerful interest groups have issued increasingly vocal calls for dramatic regulatory interventions into the country's payment cards system. In particular, they have called for a "hard cap" price-controls on interchange fees, a ban on contractual...

We study a monopolistic firm which introduces two product versions sequentially in two periods. We analyze and compare the firm's decisions on the innovation level of the new version, the production quantities and prices of both versions, and the associated profit in four settings: when the...

Consumer vulnerability affects billions of consumers worldwide, yet there is no consensus about what constitutes this state or about its consequences for consumers. Indeed, while consumer vulnerability is often invoked in consumer research, it is usually discussed informally, with little...

The demand for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) is increasing day by day. Today we are witnessing a lot of brands of FMCG products in the Indian market. But the question is how much these brands are satisfying the customers' needs in the Indian market. Keeping this point in view, the paper...

Crowdfunding has recently gained ground as an alternative financing means, particularly for start-ups and risky enterprises. We hereby analyse Romanian and South Korean students' intentions to use crowdfunding in their future ventures. Using PLS-SEM (N=441), we first investigated the influence...

The main objective of this research is to test the IoT model of acceptance technologies (the Internet of Things) among the economics students from Romania. The Internet of Things refers to the interconnection between different devices via the Internet. Through this interconnection, the...