Customer switching costs can limit the opportunities for new entry in some markets. Incumbent firms may be able to reduce these switching costs, but have no incentive to do so without regulatory intervention. For example, in telecommunications, incumbent firms can provide customers with number...

The standard Ricardian model of competition has a fixed number of firms, each with limited capacity and differential exogenous costs or qualities. In this paper, we introduce a real entry process by formulating a multistage Ricardian equilibrium model with free entry and stochastic product...

This paper studies regulatory policy interventions aimed at protecting vulnerable consumers who are disengaged and thus exposed to exploitation. We model heterogeneous consumer switching costs alongside asymmetric market shares. This setting encompasses many markets in which established rms are...

We investigate how costly acquisition and exchange of customer-specific information affects industry profit and consumer welfare. Consumers differ in their preferences for competing brands and in their switching costs between brands. Brand-producing firms use their acquired knowledge of...

This paper studies regulatory policy interventions aimed at protecting sticky consumers who are exposed to exploitation. We model heterogeneous consumer switching costs alongside asymmetric market shares. This setting encompasses many markets in which established firms are challenged by new...

We analyze how different degrees of privacy protection affect industry profits, consumer welfare, and total welfare in a model with switching costs. Firms earn higher profits under weak privacy protection compared with strong or no privacy protection. The relationship between the degree of...

This paper introduces three methodological advances to study the optimal design of static and dynamic markets. First, we apply a mechanism design approach to characterize all incentive-compatible market equilibria. Second, we conduct a normative analysis, i.e. we evaluate alternative competition...

We endogenize the trade mechanism in a search economy with many homogenous sellers and many heterogenous buyers of unobservable type. We study how heterogeneity and the traders' continuation values - which are endogenous - influence the sellers' choice of trade mechanism. Sellers trade off the...