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...

When physically similar products, of similar quality, are offered by retailers both online and offline, we often observe that the dispersion in prices of these products online is greater than the price dispersion offline. This observation runs counter to early theories that suggested price...

This research proposes an analytical model of the joint optimization of coupon face value and duration together with the product price, and determines the impact of coupon design on consumers’ redemption behavior. A model of rational forward-looking consumers’ redemption behavior is derived...

There are many situations in which a customer’s proclivity to buy the product of any firm depends not only on the classical attributes of the product such as its price and quality, but also on who else is buying the same product. Under quite general circumstances, it turns out that...

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...

Casual empiricism suggests higher quality is associated with greater variety. However, recent theoretical and empirical research has either not considered this link, or has been unable to establish unambiguous predictions about the relationship between quality and variety. In this paper we...

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...

This article summarizes and draws connections among diverse streams of theoretical and empirical research on the economics of privacy. We focus on the economic value and consequences of protecting and disclosing personal information, and on consumers' understanding and decisions regarding the...

This paper analyzes consumer inattention in the market of checking accounts. I examine the behavior of consumers who keep account tariffs that are dominated, i.e. that charge higher costs for any amount of bank services consumed through the account, by tariffs available at the same bank and...

Independent of the left-right model of ideological structure, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food and agriculture are resented across the political spectrum in Switzerland. In the absence of any real experience with genetically modified (GM) food but faced with continuous exposure to...