We consider the consequences of a shared brand name such as geographical names used to identify high quality products, for the incentives of otherwise autonomous firms to invest in quality. We contend that such collective brand labels improve communication between sellers and consumers, when the...

Recent studies (Galor and Zeira (1993), Banerjee and Newman (1993)) argue that, because of capital market imperfections, income inequality leads to inefficiencies which impede economic growth. By contrast, Keynes believed that since the rich save at a higher rate than the poor, income inequality...

We consider how facilitating consumer's ability to compare firms' past performace with that of their competitors affects firms' incentives to invest in quality of experience goods. We show that, counterintuitively, when consumers are better informed and investment in quality is noisy, firms may...

We consider a durable-good monopolist that periodically introduces new models, each new model representing an improvement upon its predecessor. We show that if the monopolist is able neither to exercise planned obsolescence (i.e., artificially shorten the life of its products) nor to give...

A striking characteristic of high-tech products is the rapid decrease of their quality-adjusted prices. Empirical studies show that the rate of decrease of QAPs is typically not constant over time; QAPs decrease rapidly at early stages of the product and then the rate of decrease tapers off....

Although it is widely held that sellers prefer to appear early in a consumer's search, some evidence from online markets suggests this need not be the case. We develop a model which incorporates costly search and costly recall and demonstrate that when both frictions are small, appearing later...

We consider the consequences of a shared brand name such as geographical names used to identify high quality products, for the incentives of otherwise autonomous firms to invest in quality. We contend that such collective brand labels improve communication between sellers and consumers, when the...