In many markets, firms make their products complex through add-ons, thus making them difficult to evaluate and compare. How does this product obfuscation affect competition, sellers’ profits, and buyers’ welfare? We study these questions in a competitive experimental market in which sellers...

A durable good monopolist faces a continuum of heterogeneous customers who make purchase decisions by comparing present and expected price-quality offers. The monopolist designs a sequence of price-quality menus to segment the market. We consider the Markov Perfect Equilibrium (MPE) of a game...

This paper investigates the pricing and vertical organization of differentiated products under imperfect competition. In a multiproduct context, a Cournot model is used to examine how substitution/complementarity relationships among products and vertical structures can affect the exercise of...

We study final product manufacturers' incentives to introduce new products into the market and how they are affected by a merger among them. We show that when manufacturers distribute their products through multi-product retailers, a manufacturers merger, although it leads to an increase in the...

In the framework of a vertically differentiated mixed duopoly, with uncovered market and costless quality choice, we study the existence of a price equilibrium when a welfare-maximizing public firm producing low quality goods competes against a profit-maximizing private firm producing high...