Firms are increasingly using technology to enable targeted, or "personalized" pricing strategies. In settings where prices are transparent to all consumers, however, there is the potential that inter-personal price differences will be perceived as inherently unfair. In response, firms may...

Switching costs are generally regarded as anti-competitive as firms can raise prices to "locked-in" consumers, at least up to the cost of switching to a lower-priced alternative. However, there is some evidence, both theoretical and empirical, that tends to show the opposite. Namely, suppliers,...

Consumer-product manufacturers, and retailers that sell their products, often sell slightly differentiated items for reasons other than appealing to heterogeneous tastes — different sizes of a popular brand, or different flavors in a common product line for instance. We argue that this...

Historically, pandemics lead to labor shortages, and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21 proved to be no different. While there are many explanations for supply-chain issues reported in a number of industries, the proximate cause for ongoing problems in producing, processing, and delivering food to...

More than one year after the outbreak of COVID-19, fruit and vegetable markets continue to adjust to the evolving landscape. In this article, we focus on three key measures of input and output market performance that serve as indicators of the stability of fruit and vegetable markets in the...

"Hard discounters" are retail formats that set retail food prices even lower than existing discount formats, such as Walmart and Target. Offering limited assortments and focusing on store-brands, these formats promise to change the competitive landscape of food retailing. In this paper, we study...