There is limited theoretical understanding of cost pass-through within markets where prices are dispersed. Under a general demand function, we analyse the effects of cost changes in a seminal model of price dispersion, where some consumers are captive to particular sellers while others are not...

In this paper, we study price stickiness in a dual-channel supply chain where a single manufacturer sells its product through an online channel and a retailer. We construct a noncooperative game where the manufacturer and the retailer decide on whether or not to costlessly adjust their prices...

Empirical studies on the effect of internet on market prices report that market prices have not always reduced in response to increased competition that is induced by the easily and relatively costlessly available market information. In this paper, we provide an explanation for why prices of all...

This paper studies Bertrand-Edgeworth competition among firms producing a homogeneous commodity under efficient rationing and constant (andidentical across firms) marginal cost until full capacity utilization is reached. Our focus is on a subset of the no pure-strategy equilibrium region of the...

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...

We investigate a differentiated mixed duopoly in which private and public firms can choose to strategically set prices or quantities by facing a union bargaining process. For the case of a unionized mixed duopoly, only public firm is able to choose a type of contract based on the degree of...

By introducing the government's preference for tax revenues into the theoretical framework of unionized mixed oligopolies, this study investigates the efficiency of privatization. The results show that (i) regardless of the government's preference for tax revenues, its incentive to privatize a...

By incorporating the additional existence of switching costs into an oligopoly search model by Stahl (1989), this paper dispels the misleading idea that search costs can simply be treated as a form of switching cost. Due to the assumption that search costs, unlike switching costs, are incurred...

This paper presents an ordered search model in which consumers search both for price and product fitness. We show that there is price dispersion in equilibrium and prices rise in the order of search. The top firms in consumer search order, though charge lower prices, earn higher profits due to...

Mullainathan, Schwartzstein, & Shleifer [Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2008] put forward a model of coarse thinking. The essential idea behind coarse thinking is that agents put situations into categories and then apply the same model of inference to all situations in a given category. We...