Earlier work characterized pricing with switching costs as a dilemma between a short-term 'harvesting' incentive to increase prices versus a long-term 'investing' incentive to decrease prices. This paper shows that small switching costs may reduce firm profits and provide short-term incentives...

We consider a dynamic oligopoly on the beer market and study the differential effects of switching costs on product prices, market shares, and profits. Our demand estimation results show large differences in brand loyalty, and switching costs across customer income segments and beer brands. Our...

In this study, we examine the differences in preference for renewable resources that arise as a result of the production locale; with the focus on the fish in individual nation's territorial waters, lakes and ponds etc. In addition, we look at incomplete regulation which often occurs in renewable...

This paper applies the theory of memory for advertising, developed in the consumer behavior literature, to an industrial organization setting to provide insight into advertising strategies in imperfectly competitive markets. There are two firms and infinitely many identical consumers. The firms...

We propose a dynamic framework for durable-goods with consumers who have different valuations and an arbitrary number of firms which compete in quantities in each period. Consumers' ability to behave strategically about the timing of consumption differs in the three environments that we analyze....

We analyze strategic relationships between buyers and sellers in markets with switching costs and dynamic uncertainty by investigating the scenario wherein a representative buyer trades with two foreign sellers located in the same foreign country. We show that, under exchange rate uncertainty,...

We consider a network market where firms can covertly extract additional revenues from consumers, which we refer to as “obfuscation”. We examine why even consumers who are aware of obfuscation (“sophisticates”) continue to stick to obfuscating networks. Depending on the relation between...

Motivated by the slow diffusion of generic drugs and the increase in prices of brand-name drugs after generic entry, I incorporate consumer learning and consumer heterogeneity into an empirical dynamic oligopoly model. In the model, firms choose prices to maximize their expected total discounted...

We consider dynamic repositioning when competing firms try to follow the evolution of consumer preferences, while taking into account the competitive interaction, both in terms of static market competition, and the dynamic effects of different firm positioning. We fully characterize the dynamic...

The common marketing practice of offering subscribers enticements to switch suppliers is explored. It is shown that this type of price discrimination is the natural mode of competition in subscription markets such as long distance telephony and banking and that it prevails even when the industry...