We study a Hotelling framework in which customers first pay a monopoly platform to enter the market before deciding between two competing services on opposite ends of a Hotelling line. This setup is common when modeling competition in Internet content provision. We find that standard...

We investigate the entry timing and location decisions under market-size uncertainty with Brownian motions in a continuous-time spatial competition duopoly model a la d'Aspremont et al. (1979). Under a sequential equilibrium, the threshold of the follower non-monotonically increases in...

We investigate the entry timing and location decisions under market-size uncertainty with Brownian motions in a continuous-time spatial competition duopoly model a la d'Aspremont et al. (1979). Under a sequential equilibrium, the threshold of the follower non-monotonically increases in...

We discuss the effect of personalized pricing on profits and welfare in a Hotelling model in which consumers can simultaneously purchase from both firms. As the additional gain from the second purchase increases, personalized pricing is more likely to harm (resp., benefit) consumers (resp.,...

Personalized pricing has become a reality through digitization. We examine firms' incentives to adopt one of the three pricing schemes: uniform, personalized, or group pricing in a Hotelling duopoly model. There are two types of consumer groups that are heterogeneous in their mismatch costs. We...

This paper generalizes the frequently used Hotelling model for two-sided markets in order to determine the equilibrium market shares. We show that advertisement levels depend neither on the media price nor on the location of the media firm. An increase in advertising revenues does not change...

We analyze the role of consumer expectations in a Hotelling model of price competition when products exhibit network effects. Expectations can be strong (stubborn), weak (price-sensitive) or partially stubborn (a mix of weak and strong). As a rule, the price-sensitivity of demand declines when...

Two firms choose locations (non-wage job characteristics) on the interval [0,1] prior to announcing wages at which they employ workers who are uniformly distributed; the (constant) marginal revenue products of workers may differ. Subgame perfect equilibria of the two-stage location-wage game are...

It is increasingly observable that competitors in different industries share customer data, which can be used for targeted pricing. We propose a modified Hotelling model with two-dimensional consumer heterogeneity to analyze the incentives for such sharing and its ensuing welfare effects. We...