That institutions matter is widely accepted among economists and so are social norms as an important category of informal institutions. Social norms matter in many economic situations, but in particular for markets. The economic literature has studied the interrelation between markets and social...

That institutions matter is widely accepted among economists and so are social norms as an important category of informal institutions. Social norms matter in many economic situations, but in particular for markets. The economic literature has studied the interrelation between markets and social...

Many believe that consumer-sourced reputational information about products would increasingly replace top-down regulation. Instead of protecting consumers through coercive laws, reputational information gleaned from the wisdom of the crowd would guide consumer decision making. There is now a...

This Article considers the spillover effects of trademarks - in particular, brand spillovers, which occur when consumer interest in a trademark increases the profits of third parties who do not own the trademark. Using techniques such as loss leaders and shelf space adjacency, retailers...

This Essay challenges the prevailing hostility towards data mining and direct marketing. The Essay starts by defining data mining and shows that the only important step is how data is used, not its aggregation or sorting. The Essay then discusses one particular type of data use, the sending of...

Aiming to reduce the number of brown (polluting) cars on the road, several countries currently promote the purchase and use of green (emission-free) cars through financial and non-financial incentives. We study how such incentives affect consumers who continue to drive brown cars. Using a simple...

Hotellings berühmtes "Prinzip der minimalen Differenzierung" behauptet, dass zwei Firmen, die sich miteinander in räumlichem Wettbewerb befinden, dieselbe Position wählen. Wenn man räumlichen Wettbewerb als Modellierung von Produktdifferenzierung versteht, bedeutet dieses, dass die Firmen...

Hotelling’s famous ‘Principle of Minimum Differentiation’ suggests that two firms engaging in spatial competition will decide to locate at the same place. Interpreting spatial competition as modeling product differentiation, firms will thus offer products that are not differentiated and...

We combine two extensions of the differentiated duopoly model of Dixit (1979), namely Caminal and Vives (1996) and Brander and Spencer (2015a,b), to analyze the effect of consumer learning on firms' incentives to differentiate their products in models of Cournot and Bertrand competition....