In a repeated price game with long but finitely-lived consumers, the use of staggered long-term contracts enables firms to earn positive profits for a wider range of discount factors and market structures. Intertemporal bundling reduces the gains from business- stealing while leaving the cost of...

Traditional peak-load and stochastic peak-load models assume firms have prior information about when peak demand occurs. However, price dispersion, such as is typically used by firms practicing yield management, can achieve some of the same efficient demand shifting even when the peak time is...

Tying, bundling, minimum purchase requirements, loyalty discounts, exclusive dealing, and other purchase restraints can create stronger incentives for firms to invest in product quality. In our first example, the firm sells a durable experience good and a complementary non-durable good to a...

We consider a general model of monopoly price discrimination and characterize the conditions under which price discrimination is and is not profitable. We show that an important condition for profitable price discrimination is that the percentage change in surplus (i.e., consumers' total...

We show that demand uncertainty leads to vertical product differentiation even when consumers are homogeneous. When a firm anticipates that its inventory or capacity may not be fully utilized, product variety can reduce its expected costs of excess capacity. When the firm offers a continuum of...