In this paper we establish that there are large and persistent differences in final transaction prices for identical new cars, and that demographic characteristics explain at least 20% of the observed variation. Controlling for all observable aspects of the transaction, older consumers perform...

We revisit the relationship between competition and price discrimination in the airline industry. Theoretically, we show that, if consumers differ in terms of both their underlying willingness-to-pay and their brand loyalty, competition may increase price differences between some consumers while...

In this paper we study mergers in two-sided industries. While mergers have been studied extensively in traditional industries, and there is a large and rapidly evolving literature on two-sided markets, there has been little work empirically examining mergers in these markets. We present a model...

This paper studies the role of imperfect information in explaining price dispersion. We use a new panel dataset on the U.S. retail gasoline industry, and propose a new test of temporal price dispersion to establish the importance of consumer search. We show that price rankings vary significantly...

We examine the scope and value of targeted advertising in the magazine industry. We use data on reader characteristics at individual media, in contrast to previous work that has needed to infer this information from aggregate data. Our results show a strong relationship between subscriber...

This paper seeks to establish the importance of targeted advertising in media markets. Using zip-code level circulation for U.S. newspapers, I show that newspapers facing more competition have lower circulation prices but higher advertising prices than similar newspapers facing little or no...