We consider a standard result of customer market theory: if firms have stable customer relations and face financial frictions, they may keep prices relatively high on their locked-in shoppers to maintain short-term profits at the expense of future market shares in times of low demand and vice...

This paper studies regulatory policy interventions aimed at protecting vulnerable consumers who are disengaged and thus exposed to exploitation. We model heterogeneous consumer switching costs alongside asymmetric market shares. This setting encompasses many markets in which established rms are...

We characterize mixed-strategy equilibria when capacity constrained suppliers can charge location-based prices to different customers. We establish an equilibrium with prices that weakly increase in the costs to supply a customer. Despite prices above costs and excess capacities, each supplier...

We characterize mixed-strategy equilibria when capacity constrained suppliers can charge location-based prices to different customers. We establish an equilibrium with prices that weakly increase in the costs to supply a customer. Despite prices above costs and excess capacities, each supplier...

We study how consumer search affects pricing in markets with incumbents and entrants using panel data on German electricity retail markets. Consumers observe the baseline price of the incumbent and decide whether or not to search. Incumbent providers can price discriminate between searching and...

Using detailed Swedish micro data on prices and costs, this paper documents a decrease in the dispersion of changes in prices and markups following the introduction of an official inflation target of 2 percent. Using a structural model to decompose the change in the price-change distribution by...

We analyze price dispersion using panel data from a large price comparison site. We use past pricing behavior to instrument for potential endogeneity that might result from the selection of firms to certain product markets. We find that greater price adjustment costs result in greater price...

This article studies competition in markets with transport costs and capacity constraints. We compare the outcomes of price competition and coordination in a theoretical model and find that when firms compete, they more often serve more distant customers who are closer to the competitor's plant....

According to static models of industrial organization, a rise in competition decreases prices. In this paper, I test whether this conclusion can be reversed in the mobile telecommunications markets where dynamic efficiency effects might be significant. The empirical test relies on the change in...

We investigate the impact of consumer search and competition on pricing strategies in Germany’s electricity retail. We utilize a unique panel dataset on spatially varying search requests at major online price comparison websites to construct a direct measure of search intensity and combine...