In a variety of purchasing situations, consumers may focus primarily on headline prices, ignoring the full costs associated with acquiring and maintaining a product or service contract. Even when this is the case, it is widely believed that intense competition would adequately protect consumers...

Manufacturers frequently resist heavy discounting of their products by retailers, especially when they are used as so-called loss leaders. Since low prices should increase demand and manufacturers could simply refuse to fund deep price promotions, such resistance is puzzling at first sight. We...

In this paper we investigate collusion in an infinitely repeated Bertrand duopoly where firms have different discount factors. In order to study how a collusive agreement is reached we model the equilibrium selection as an alternating-offer bargaining game. The selected equilibrium has several...

Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing schemes are popular in certain industries and not others. We model the seller's choice of pricing scheme under various market structures assuming consumers share their surplus. We show that the profitability and popularity of PWYW depend not only on consumers'...

This paper uses new data to reexamine trends in concentration in U.S. markets from 1994 to 2019. The paper's main contribution is to construct concentration measures that reflect narrowly defined consumption-based product markets, as would be defined in an antitrust setting, while accounting for...

We consider mergers between multi-product firms in a market with monopolistically competitive fringe of single-product firms. Aggregate product variety is determined by product variety choices of multi-product firms and entry/exit decisions of single-product firms. Mergers can generate marginal...

Interest rate caps, also called usury ceilings, are a widely used policy tool to protect consumers from excessive charges by loan providers. However, they are often cited as a barrier for the advancement of financial inclusion, as they may reduce the incentives to provide loans to lower-income...

How should firms optimally choose prices and promotional strategies and how should they position their products when consumers are "relative thinkers"? We provide answers in a model that extends the seminal contributions of Varian (1980) and Narasimhan (1988) and derive both managerial...

Crowdfunding has mostly been used to finance very unique projects. Recently, however, companies have begun using it to finance more traditional products where they compete against other sellers of similar products. Major crowdfunding platforms, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, as well as Amazon have...

This paper studies the disposal costs' effect on consumer surplus and firms' profits. The costlier disposal, the less is disposed of, firms' competition for market shares increases, thereby benefiting consumers. Yet firms decrease their production to mitigate costs, affecting consumer surplus...