This article analyzes the life and nonlife insurance markets with horizontal differentiation and brand loyalties using a spatial competition model. We construct a three-stage game that includes sales promotion in the first stage, insurance product characteristics in the second stage, and...

We propose a model of addictive consumption to study the demand for imperfect substitutes involving substances like alcohol, nicotine and opioids, as well as behavioral addictions like gambling and digital addiction. We study a 2017 Italian policy aimed at reducing gambling by limiting the...

This paper reviews the Hotelling literature of product differentiation. The purpose of this work is to examine the impact of the market structure on price competitionand equilibrium differentiation. The existence of a general ’principle of differentiation’ is rejected. In contrast,...

The paper studies the impact of a diversification vs. a core-competence oriented strategy using an agent-based simulation model with the aim to analyze whether agent-based models are a viable tool for analyzing questions related to corporate strategy.

We analyze a duopoly game in which products are initially differentiatedin variety and quality. Each consumer has a most preferred variety and aquality valuation. Customization provides ideal varieties but has noeffect on product qualities. The firms first choose whether to customizetheir...

We consider a horizontally differentiated oligopoly and investigate the relationship between merger cost savings and network effects for the incentives of firms to merge and for the postmerger welfare outcomes. We show that it is more profitable to be an insider rather than an outsider of the...

Das vorliegende Arbeitspapier beschäftigt sich mit der Annahme, dass das Internet zu Änderungen im Wettbebwerb innerhalb einer Branche geführt haben soll. Ziel ist es, die Aussagen der Annahme zu hinterfragen.

We formulate a horizontal differentiation model with price-sensitive demand and asymmetric transport costs, in the context of transport scheduling. Two competitors choose fares and departure times in a fixed time interval. Consumers are distributed uniformly along the interval; their location...

In this paper, we focus on the uncertainty in consumer taste and study how a retailer can benefit from acquiring that taste information in the presence of competition between the retailer's store brand and a manufacturer's national brand. In this context, we also identify the optimal information...

We consider the spatial competition between two traditional physical (or offline) retailers and an Internet (or online) retailer where the efficiency of the latter differs from that of the former. We assume consumers are heterogeneous across two dimensions: (i) the costs of traveling to either...