A durable good monopolist faces a continuum of heterogeneous customers who make purchase decisions by comparing present and expected price-quality offers. The monopolist designs a sequence of price-quality menus to segment the market. We consider the Markov Perfect Equilibrium (MPE) of a game...

This article considers a durable goods monopolist's choice of price and durability in a setting where durability choice controls the speed with which quality deteriorates. The article derives three main results. First, the price at which old units trade on the secondhand market limits what the...

I show that Swan's (1970) independence result requires a multiplicative interaction between durability and all other quality attributes. Because there is no compelling argument for a multiplicativity in quality, monopolists tend to distort durability, even with constant marginal costs....