paper investigates how a monopolist optimally designs its product line when consumers differ both in their taste for quality … their choice and thereby increase the product's value to others. Often, average quality is lower than in a market without … image concerns and there is underprovision as compared to the welfare-maximizing allocation. Although average quality is …

-concerned consumers buy excessive quality instead. By restricting the product space, monopoly allows for more efficient allocation of … markets where consumers are heterogeneous with respect to both their concerns for the quality of goods and the image … associated with buying them. Consumers with a taste for quality lend a positive image to the product of their choice and thereby …

image-concerned consumers buy excessive quality instead. Monopoly may therefore yield higher welfare than competition …In this paper, I study markets where consumers are heterogeneous with respect to both their concerns for the quality of … goods and the image associated with them. Consumers with a taste for quality lend a positive image to the product of their …

' behavior and firms' incentives to upgrade product quality in markets where information is traditionally limited. I first build … a model of consumer search with firms' endogenous quality decisions. In this model, lower search costs reallocate demand … toward higher-quality producers, raising firms' incentives to upgrade quality, and more so for firms selling ex-ante lower-quality …

We consider a non-durable good monopoly that collects data on its customers in order to profile them and subsequently … monopoly equilibrium profit is globally an increasing function of the privacy cost while in the PHI case, it is almost always a …

discrimination will improve monopoly profit if and only if information precision is higher than a certain threshold level. This U … monopoly’s investment in information accuracy. However, this cost should not dissuade firms to collect some information on …

discrimination will improve monopoly profit if and only if information precision is higher than a certain threshold level. This U … monopoly’s investment in information accuracy. However, this cost should not dissuade firms to collect some information on …