This paper examines four million daily price observations for more than 1,000 consumer electronics products on the price comparison site http://Shopper.com. We find little support for the notion that prices on the Internet are converging to the 'law of one price.' In addition, observed levels of...

The recent rapid growth of the Internet as a medium of communication and commerce, combined with the development of sophisticated software tools, are to a large extent responsible for producing a new kind of information: databases with detailed records about consumers' preferences. These...

Recent developments in information technology (IT) have resulted in the collection of a vast amount of customer-specific data. As IT advances, the quality of such information improves. We analyze a unifying spatial price discrimination model that encompasses the two most studied paradigms of...

We derive bounds on the ratio of a monopolist's profit from third-degree price discrimination to that from uniform pricing. If a monopolist serves N independent markets, demand is continuous, and the cost function is superadditive, then the profit ratio is bounded by N. This bound is tight...

We study the response of residential water demand to nonlinear prices by exploiting a natural experiment arising from a water pricing reform in a major Chinese city. The reform introduced an unconventional Increasing Block Tariff featuring prices set according to annual cumulative consumption...

Previous research has found price discrimination in business-to-consumer (B2C) markets, where buyers are end customers. There is limited research on suppliers' price-quoting behaviors and price discrimination in business-to-business (B2B) markets. It is unclear whether certain characteristics of...

We examine a durable goods monopolist's optimal dynamic price and product quality strategy when buyers are rational, have diverse tastes, and can trade used durables among themselves. Our analysis makes four main points. First, in contrast to the well-known time-inconsistency problem of the...

Some marketing orders allow an agricultural industry to regulate the flow of product to market. We examine a more common, but less controversial, aspect of marketing orders, the setting and enforcement of grades, and show that purposefully introducing error into the grading process reduces...

We introduce a flexible third-degree price discrimination framework by modeling the information firms possess about consumers' locations (preferences) on the Salop circle as a partition. Higher information quality is translated into a partition refinement. In the limit, we obtain the perfect...

Consumers are commonly required to subscribe to particular tariff options before uncertainty regarding their future purchases gets resolved. Since the general comparison of welfare performance of different pricing mechanisms is ambiguous, this article empirically evaluates the expected welfare...