Recent economic research has shown that fixed-price quality competition in the NHS in England is benefiting patients and taxpayers. This research has focused primarily on important outcomes of competition, for example the number of lives saved. In this paper we focus on the mechanism of...

We analyse the relationship between the quality of a GP practice in England and the degree of competition that it faces (as indicated by the number of nearby rival GP practices). We find that those GP practices that are located close to other rival GP practices provide a higher quality of care...

We run a market experiment where firms can choose not only their price but also whether to present comparable offers. They are faced with artificial demand from consumers who make mistakes when assessing the net value of products on the market. If some offers are comparable however, some savvy...

We model competing ecolabels sponsored by an industry trade association and an environmental group. For either sponsor in autarky, multi-tier labels are more attractive when there are many producers with high cost of quality, and the cost gap between low-cost and high-cost firms is large. When...

Online review aggregators (e.g., booking dot com or ClubKviar) provide detailed information about experience goods, such as restaurants and hotels. This study fosters the understanding of how such aggregators modify competition, profits and welfare. Using a spokes model of horizontal...

We address the issue of risk aversion in a competitive equilibrium when some buyers engage in learning and information is conveyed through the price system. Specifically, since the learning process yields uncertainty, we study the effect of risk aversion on the equilibrium outcomes of the model,...

Alongside the consideration of price, competition authorities recognize that quality can be as, if not more, important in some markets. But as competition authorities also recognize, identifying the dimensions of competition important to many consumers is difficult. Even when these dimensions of...

I analyze credit rating agencies and competition on a market with more than two agencies. Both investors and agencies react to each other's behavior. My model predicts cyclic dynamics in the base case: not only does the presence of trusting investors facilitate ratings inflation. In turn,...

We model strategic interaction on a market where two labeling organizations compete and firms in duopoly decide which labels to offer. The incumbent label maximizes its own profit, and is challenged by an industry standard which maximizes industry profit. Using a nested logit, the result of this...

We describe a first experiment on whether product complexity affects competition and consumers in retail markets. We are unable to detect a systematic effect of product complexity on prices, except insofar as the demand elasticity for complex products is higher. However, there is qualified...