We derive the optimal selling mechanism for a monopolist who is privately informed about the attributes of a horizontally differentiated good. To do so, we set up an informed principal problem in a Hotelling model where the buyer's preferences are described in terms of a base consumption value...

This paper explores a monopolist's optimal multi-tier quantity-discount prices and shows that only the last tier's marginal cost is relevant in determining the tier prices and each tier's price is equal to its preceding tier's marginal revenue. An increase in total output is associated with...

The Rule of Reason, which has come to dominate modern antitrust law, allows defendants the opportunity to justify their conduct by demonstrating “procompetitive” effects. Seizing the opportunity, defendants have begun offering increasingly numerous and creative explanations for their...

The Internet allows sellers to track “window shoppers,” consumers who look but do not buy, and to lure them back later by targeting them with an advertised sale. This new technology thus facilitates intertemporal price discrimination, but simultaneously makes it too easy for a seller to...

We provide a general definition of bundling that encompasses the bundling of two or more objects over sets of three or more objects. Bundled objects may be units of the same product, different products, or both. Such bundling encompasses a range of controversial pricing practices that have drawn...

I study a monopolistic pricing problem in which the consumer performs product research to determine whether or not to purchase a good. The consumer receives a signal of quality via a Brownian motion process with a type-dependent drift. I fully characterize the consumer's optimal strategy; she...

Under demand uncertainty, a risk-averse firm adopts marginal-cost pricing when consumers are homogenous. When consumers are heterogeneous, the equilibrium price tends to move towards marginal cost as the firm's risk aversion increases and it equates marginal cost if the firm is infinitely risk...

In a dynamic storable good market where demand changes over time, we investigate the producer's strategic incentives to hold inventories in response to the possibility of buyer stockpiling. The literature on storable goods has demonstrated that buyer stockpiling in anticipation of higher future...

In this article we study patterns of vertical product differentiation in a multi-product monopoly using a random utility model. Prior research shows that applying such a model in a multi-product setting implies symmetric patterns of product differentiation in which all product variants of a...