A durable-goods monopolist may use quality degradation as a commitment not to lower price in the future. The introduction of damaged goods expedites low-valuation consumers’ future demands, and helps the firm to mitigate the Coasian time-consistency problem. In such a case, damaged goods are...

A durable-goods monopolist may use quality degradation as a commitment not to lower price in the future. The introduction of damaged goods expedites low-valuation consumers' future demands, and helps the firm to mitigate the Coasian time-consistency problem. In such a case, damaged goods are...

This paper examines how a durable-goods monopolist’s choice of product quality interacts with time inconsistency problems in an environment, where the firm faces an irreversible decision on quality and unit production costs increase in quality. The monopolist may have incentives to choose a...

Media firms sometimes allow consumers to pay to remove advertisements from an advertisement-based product. We formally examine an ad-based monopolist's incentives to introduce this option. When deciding whether to introduce the option to pay, the monopolist compares the potential direct revenues...

Media firms sometimes allow consumers to pay to remove advertisements from an advertisement-based product. We formally examine an ad-based monopolist's incentives to introduce this option. When deciding whether to introduce the option to pay, the monopolist compares the potential direct revenues...

A simple two-period linear demand durable-goods monopoly model is analyzed where the firm faces an ad-valorem tax. Unlike previous models, the impact of an expected future tax is not analyzed; rather it is assumed the tax only is levied in the first (current) period. The model shows that such a...

This paper studies optimal nonlinear pricing for a monopolist when consumers' preferences exhibit temptation and self-control as in Gul and Pesendorfer (2001a). Consumers are subject to temptation inside the store but exercise self-control, and those foreseeing large self-control costs do not...

I analyze a model of directed search in which a consumer inspects a finite number of products sharing attributes with each others. The consumer discovers her valuation for the attributes of the inspected products and adapts her search strategy based on what she has learned. The consumer...

We consider a non-durable good monopoly that collects data on its customers in order to profile them and subsequently practice price discrimination on returning customers. The monopolist's price discrimination scheme is leaky, in the sense that an endogenous fraction of consumers choose to incur...

Using a Markov-perfect equilibrium model, we show that the use of customer data to practice intertemporal price discrimination will improve monopoly profit if and only if information precision is higher than a certain threshold level. This U-shaped relationship lends support to a popular view...