Science and technology advances drive firms to continually enhance their product’s performance and launch sequentially improving offerings. Firms face challenges in marketing such improving products to well informed, forward-looking consumers who anticipate product improvements and seek to...

Despite the empirical relevance of advertising strategies in concentrated markets, the economics literature is largely silent on the effect of persuasive advertising strategies on pricing and market structure and increasing (or decreasing) dominance. We propose a simple model of persuasive...

Consumer review systems have become an important marketing communication tool through which consumers share and learn product information. Although there is abundant evidence that consumer reviews have significant impact on product sales, the design of consumer review systems and its impact on...

In many markets, firms make their products complex through add-ons, thus making them difficult to evaluate and compare. How does this product obfuscation affect competition, sellers’ profits, and buyers’ welfare? We study these questions in a competitive experimental market in which sellers...

We analyze entry, pricing and product design in a model with differentiated products. Under plausible conditions, entry into an initially monopolized market leads to higher prices for some, possibly all, consumers. Entry can induce a misallocation of goods to consumers, segment the market in a...

We analyze entry, pricing, and product design in a model with differentiated products. Market equilibrium can be "separating," with multiple sellers and a sorting of heterogeneous consumers across goods, or "exclusionary," with one seller serving all customer types. Entry into an initially...