This paper theoretically analyzes the role of reference prices on competition and welfare in a context of a circular city model with free entry and reference prices, in which paying market prices above a reference negatively affects the utility of consumers. Agents interact in a three-stage...

Mediating transactions through the Internet removes important cues that salespeople can use to assess a consumer's willingness to pay. We analyze whether dealers' difficulty in identifying consumer characteristics on the Internet and consumers' ease in finding information affect race and gender...

We derive the closed-form solution that characterizes the equilibrium in the circular city model, when competing firms have heterogeneous production costs. Tractability issues in this setting are well-known and have not been resolved in prior work. In this paper, the equilibrium solution...