Critics of capitalism contend that many products are designed to have uneconomically short lives, with the intention of forcing consumers to repurchase too frequently. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as 'planned obsolescence.'In this paper, the authors show that a competitive market may...

Abtract: This paper considers learning in an imperfectly competitive setting. By allowing an opponent a ``head start," unsuccessful unilateral experimentation may jeopardize future sales and profits. We show that even in the absence of spillover and signalling effects, competition can inhibit...

This paper shows that prices may be sticky when buyers must search to determine the current market price and there is uncertainty about the expected duration of cost changes. Specifically, during periods when costs, and hence prices are high, low valuation consumers optimally stop searching and...