This paper asks whether brand extension can serve as a signal of product quality given that it costs less than a new brand. (Existing literature has assumed either that brand extension is cost-neutral or that it costs more.) I show that it can as a perfect Bayesian equilibrium, but the argument...

Are price-matching guarantees anticompetitive? This paper examines the incentives for price-matching guarantees in markets where information about prices is costly. Under some conditions the conventional explanation of price-matching announcements as facilitating collusion finds support, and is...

Consumer goods industries tend to be dominated by a small number of nationally-branded goods. In many cases, brands are one of the few sources of differentiation between otherwise physically undifferentiated products. In this chapter we survey the literature on the role of consumer branding and...

We propose a structural approach to measuring brand value in an equilibrium framework using observational data. Brand value is defined as the difference in equilibrium profit between the brand in question and its counterfactual unbranded equivalent on search attributes. Our structural model...

Behavioral decision researchers have documented a number of anomalies that seem to run counter to established theories of consumer behavior from microeconomics that are often at the core of analytical models in marketing. A natural question therefore is how equilibrium behavior and strategies...

Are price-matching guarantees anticompetitive? This paper examines the incentives for price-matching guarantees in markets where information about prices is costly. Under some conditions the conventional explanation of price-matching announcements as facilitating collusion finds support, and is...

A comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding consumers' information search behavior is presented. Unlike previous research, our model identifies not only what factors affect consumers' search behavior but also how these factors interact with each other. In particular, the model...