We study the role of two-part transfer schemes as signals of consumer demand from a privately informed franchisor to an uninformed franchisee. Distortions in the wholesale price and the up-front franchise fee offered by the high demand franchisor may possibly separate the different types of...

We consider a single period model where a monopolist introduces a product of uncertain quality. Before pricing and informative advertising decisions take place, the producer observes the true quality of the good while consumers receive an independent signal which is correlated with the true...

This paper presents a signaling model where both price and advertising expenditures are used as signals of the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good. Consumers can be either "fastidious" or "indifferent". Fastidious individuals place a greater value on a...

This paper studies the role of advertising and prices as signals of quality in a purely static setting, where repeat purchases are suppressed altogether, but where advertising affects demand directly. We first show, under standard regularity assumptions, that the high-quality firm will distort...

Commercial open source software (COSS) products--privately developed software based on publicly available source code--represent a rapidly growing, multibillion-dollar market. A unique aspect of competition in the COSS market is that many open source licenses require firms to make certain...

While millions of products are sold on its retail platform, Amazon.com itself stocks and sells only a very small fraction of them. Most of these products are sold by third-party sellers who pay Amazon a fee for each unit sold. Empirical evidence clearly suggests that Amazon tends to sell...