This paper studies how a firm should make pricing and transparency decisions when consumers care about supply chain characteristics. We first show how preferences that account for price and unit cost constrain the firm's pricing power and profit. Surprisingly, we find that the firm may be forced...

It is common for auctions to feature reserve prices that are kept secret. In auctions with independent private values, there is no clear theoretical explanation for why the reserve price should be disclosed publicly or kept secret. Therefore, we conducted laboratory experiments to investigate...

Two-sided platforms are often coupled with exclusive hardware products that connect two sides of users, the consumers of the hardware product (i.e., buyers) and the application developers (i.e., sellers). The hardware product in the platform business model introduces three important issues that...

We show that most US food, drugstore, and mass merchandise chains charge nearly-uniform prices across stores, despite wide variation in consumer demographics and the level of competition. Estimating a model of consumer demand reveals substantial within-chain variation in price elasticities and...

Online tracking technologies (e.g. HTTP cookies) allow firms to engage in both targeted advertising and price discrimination. By adopting anonymizing technologies, consumers can prevent firms from tracking them. This paper analyzes firms' pricing decisions and consumers' adoption of anonymizing...

This paper investigates the viability of Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing when firms compete without restrictions of a minimum payment requirement. We show that the equilibrium outcomes are different when underpayers, consumers paying less than marginal cost, are present as opposed to when they...

Retailers routinely post two prices on the price tag - a posted or sale price, and a higher regular or an advertised reference price. Together, these prices create a perception of an initial discount that the consumer is getting. In this paper, we investigate the impact of this initial perceived...

This paper theoretically analyzes the role of reference prices on competition and welfare in a context of a circular city model with free entry and reference prices, in which paying market prices above a reference negatively affects the utility of consumers. Agents interact in a three-stage...

Matched product data is collected from the leading online grocers in the U.S. The same exact products are identified in scanner data. The paper documents pricing strategies within and across online (and offline) retailers. First, online retailers exhibit substantially less uniform pricing than...

To provide a more exible workhorse model of temporary price reductions or "sales", this paper presents a substantially generalized "clearinghouse" sales framework. Our framework permits multiple dimensions of firm heterogeneity, and views firms as competing directly in utility rather than...