In this article, the impact of common labels is investigated with both theoretical and empirical approaches. Recent statistics regarding the egg market in France suggest that retailer brands largely adopt common labels. A simple theoretical framework enables us to determine the conditions under...

Since 1992, the European Union has protected high-quality agricultural products based on geographical origin using designations of geographical indications (GIs). U.S. producers and processors can obtain a type of trademark called a certification mark, which provides similar protections to that...

Japanese consumers are sophisticated, highly conscious of food quality and safety, and willing to pay for attributes they believe define a high-quality, safe product. A recent series of domestic and international food safety crises have elevated the importance of meat safety among Japanese...

Traditional recommendations for building sustainable competitive advantages revolve around differentiating a product from the competition along attributes that are important and relevant to customers. However, strategic approaches based on such notions do not represent viable options for...

This paper extends Armstrong, Vickers, and Zhou (2007) to the case with multiple prominent firms. All consumers first search among prominent firms, and if their products are not satisfactory, they continue to search among non-prominent ones. Prominent firms will charge a lower price than their...

Oversupply has posed a number of problems for the Australian wine industry in recent times. When disaggregated from the industry level, however, the problem can be better described as a range of attribute-specific disequilibria. To date, solutions to this problem have predominantly revolved...

An innovative firm chooses strategically whether to patent its process innovation or rely on secrecy. By doing so, the firm manages its rival’s beliefs about the size of the innovation, and affects the incentives in the product market. Different measures of competitive pressure in the product...

This paper shows (1) that the Spence-Dixit-Vives model of linear demand for differentiated varieties is implied if supplies of substitutes reduce individual consumers' reservation prices as indicated in the paper, (2) that for the micro-foundation-based version SDV demand and endogenous sunk...