Cet article réexamine le débat sur l'utilisation du prix et de la publicite comme signaux de qualité, et sur les effets concurrentiels de la publicité. Nous montrons que la publicité a un rôle de signal lorsqu'il y a rivalité en prix entre les entreprises, contrairement à ce que l'on...

The present communication analyses the relationships between work organisation and quality systems. The analysis is based on results from a study funded by the "Specific Programme for the Development of Portuguese Industry" (PEDIP). The main issues which have been currently associated with work...

The valorization of a country, region or geographical area’s touristic patrimony implies the fact that minimum conditions regarding tourists’ journey, sojourn and qualitative free time spending should be provided. In essence, the combination of these elements offers tourists the highest...

We propose an export price indicator adjusted for non-price factors as a more meaningful measure of a country’s competitiveness than traditional indicators. Our starting point is the approach developed by Broda and Weinstein (2006), who adjust price developments for changes in varieties of...

This discussion paper led to an article in <I>Games and Economic Behavior</I> (2012), pp. 120-138.<P> 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,...</p></i>

This paper studies the relationship between three key elements of the marketing mix, namely, price, product, and promotion, in a model where a seller employs informative advertising to launch a new product. We propose a fairly general advertising technology for the study of three promotional...

Nowadays, quality is often divided into service quality and product quality. The dimensions of quality of service are quite different from the quality of product due to the main difference between services and products (service intangibility and the customer who can use it only once). Customer...

We study the informational role of prices in a stochastic environment. We provide a closed-form solution of the monopoly problem when the price imperfectly signals quality to the uninformed buyers. We then study the effect of noise on output, market price, information flows, and expected...

We present a diagrammatic and step-by-step analysis of price signaling quality. Because quality is a continuum on the real positive line, out-of-equilibrium beliefs need not be specified, i.e., every positive price is a positive outcome in equilibrium. We first study the behavior of the monopoly...

If a product has two dimensions of quality, one observable and one not, a firm can use observable quality as a signal of unobservable quality. The correlation between consumers' valuation of high quality in each dimension is a key determinant of the feasibility of such signaling. A firm may use...