Using consistent agent-based techniques, this research explores the welfare consequences of product differentiation on congested networks. The economic analysis focuses on the source, evolution, measurement, and impact of product differentiation with heterogeneous users on a mixed ownership...

In many (online) markets, consumers can readily observe prices, but need to examine individual products at positive cost in order to assess how well they match their needs. We propose a tractable model of price-directed sequential search in a market where firms compete in prices. Each product...

We consider an oligopolistic market where firms compete in price and quality and where consumers are heterogeneous in knowledge: some consumers know both the prices and quality of the products offered, some know only the prices and some know neither. We show that two types of signalling...

The unprecedented access of firms to consumer level data facilitates more precisely targeted individual pricing. We study the incentives of a data broker to sell data about a segment of the market to three competing firms. The segment only includes a share of the consumers in the market around...

We empirically test the hypothesis that the discounts offered by firms to consumers who purchase tickets in advance increase with the intensity of competition. We develop a new measure of competition for which we use the proximity (in departure time) of a given flight to its competitors to infer...