A known policy dilemma occurs between the need to curb extra-large profits by some industries, like pharmaceuticals, and the need to ensure the incentive to produce is not damaged. This paper shows that a profit cap, imposed via taxation on a group of firms, can simultaneously eliminate...

This paper investigates a Cournot game model with a nonlinear demand function where a profit-maximizing firm competes against a socially concerned firm. The timing of the game is as follows. In stage one, each firm non-cooperatively decides whether to offer a wage-rise contract policy (WRCP) as...

This study constructs a consumer search model in which some consumers search for multiple products, whereas others search for a single product. A price difference arises because of a difference in the price elasticity for each group. We show that a positive demand shock to one of the products...

This paper considers a vertically related industry where an upstream supplier simultaneously negotiates with two downstream retailers endowed with (possibly) asymmetric bargaining powers, over the purchase of an input. Downstream firms have asymmetric capacities and downstream competition has a...

We examine how retailers discount the prices of product systems versus their constituent components. The topic is important because such systems are ubiquitous in our daily lives. In particular, many high-tech markets revolve around complex multi-component systems – e.g. a camera system...

If producers have more information than consumers about goods’ attributes, then they may use non-price (rather than price) adjustment mechanisms and, consequently, the market may reach a new equilibrium even if prices remain sticky. We study a situation where producers adjust the quantity (per...

Are nominal prices sticky because menu costs prevent sellers from continuously adjusting their prices to keep up with inflation or because search frictions make sellers indifferent to any real price over some non-degenerate interval? The paper answers the question by developing and calibrating a...

This paper analyzes optimal product lines when consumers differ both in their taste for quality and in their desire for social image. The market outcome features partial pooling and product differentiation that is not driven by heterogeneous valuations for quality but by image concerns. A...

When firms' shrouding of charges, as in Gabaix and Laibson (2006), meets with consumers' salient thinking, as in Bordalo et al. (2013), this can have severe welfare implications. The ensuing excessive competition for headline prices tends to inefficiently bias consumers' choice towards...