This chapter analyses the tensions between books and book markets as expressions of culture and books as products in profit-making businesses and includes insights from the theory of industrial organisation. Governments intervene in the market for books through laws concerning prices of books,...

We examine the relation between consumer search and equilibrium prices when collusion is endogenously determined. We develop a theoretical model and show that average price is a U-shaped function of the measure of searchers: prices are highest when there are no searchers (local monopoly power)...

This paper develops a model of competition among multiproduct retailers that is consistent with observed pricing regularities, e.g., virtually all products have large mass points in their price distributions and most deviations fall below the mass point. The basis of the model is that, because...

In a typical sale model, retailers compete for informed consumers by changing prices in every period. Thus, if menu costs resist price adjustments, they prevent not only prices from equilibrating demands and supplies, but also retailers' competition. I investigate the effects of menu costs on...

In this paper we consider the problem of outlet pricing and location in the context of unobserved spatial demand. Our analysis constitutes a scenario wherein capacity-constrained firms set prices conditioned on their location, demand and costs. This enables firms to develop maps of latent demand...

Problem Definition: We empirically evaluate the short-term effects of time-based tariffs on the electricity demand, consumer welfare, retailers and the environment.Academic/Practical Relevance: Electricity retailers around the world have been introducing time-based pricing programs. We study the...

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...

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...

We study how access pricing affects network competition when consumers' subscription demand is elastic and networks compete with non-linear prices and can use termination-based price discrimination. In the case of annexed per minute termination charge, our model generalizes the results of Gans...