We study subgame-perfect equilibria of the classical quality-price, multistage game of vertical product differentiation. Each firm can choose the levels of an arbitrary number of qualities. Consumers' valuations are drawn from independent and general distributions. The unit cost of production is...

This paper develops a model of nonlinear pricing with competition. The novel element is that each consumer's willingness to pay for quality is private information and is allowed to differ across brands. The consumer's preferences are represented by a multidimensional type containing the marginal...

This paper examines endogenous quality provision by firms with market power when social influence plays a role in consumers' purchasing decisions. A monopolist chooses price and quality of a single product to sell to consumers with unit mass. Quality has two dimensions: m-quality, which...

We present a framework for measuring software quality using pricing and demand data, and empirical estimates that quantify the extent of quality degradation associated with software versioning. Using a 7-month, 108-product panel of software sales from Amazon.com, we document the extent to which...

In the ICT sector, product-software is an important factor for the quality of the products (e.g. cell phones). In this context, open source software enables firms to avoid quality competition as they can cooperate on quality without an explicit contract. The economics of open source (OS) versus...

This paper studies the effects of demand uncertainty and imperfect competition on market entry and product quality choice. We develop a dynamic duopoly model allowing for either a fixed or a flexible quality choice. We find that under the fixed quality choice the follower chooses a higher...

The recent extensive study of vertical product differentiation models has allowed for the analysis of international trade issues in the presence of country asymmetries in terms of product qualities, technology, costs, market size and income. In the presence of such asymmetries, national...

This work builds and tests a vertical product differentiation duopoly model, where firms first choose quality and then choose prices, in the lab. We consider both the case in which production costs are unaffected by the quality of the good produced and the case in which production costs increase...

We study a firm's incentives to build and maintain reputation for quality, when quality is persistent and can be certified at a cost. We characterize all Markov-perfect equilibria where the firm's choices -i.e., timing of certification and investment– depend only on the firm's reputation. MPE...

We build a modified measure of disaggregation quality (MDQ), based on the disaggregation quality (DQ) measure from Chen, Miao, and Shevlin (2015). Like DQ, MDQ is a parsimonious measure of data disaggregation quality in the annual report that can be constructed through the percentage of...