We consider consumer entry in the canonical monopolistic nonlinear pricing model ( Mussa and Rosen 1978) wherein consumers learn their preference “types” after incurring privately known entry costs. We show that by taking into account consumer entry, the nature of optimal nonlinear pricing...

If a monopolist (any manufacturer with downward-sloping demand) cannot commit to a wholesale price in advance, even competitive retailers will be reluctant to enter the market, knowing that once they have entered, the monopolist has incentive to choose a higher price and reduce their...

Mechanisms where sellers set the price and are charged a linear commission fee are widely used by real world intermediaries, e.g. by real estate brokers. Empirically these commission fees exhibit very little variance, both across heterogeneous regional markets and over time. So far, there is no...

We conduct experiments testing the relationship between excess capacity and pricing in repeated Bertrand-Edgeworth duopolies and triopolies. We systematically vary the experimental markets between low excess capacity (suggesting monopoly) and no capacity constraints (suggesting perfect...

Two sellers engage in price competition to attract buyers located on a network. The value of the good of either seller to any buyer depends on the number of neighbors on the network who consume the same good. For a generic specification of consumption externalities, we show that an equilibrium...

The paper deals with the competitive effects of price guarantees in a spatial duopoly where consumers can search for lower prices but have to incur hassle costs if they want to claim a price guarantee. It is shown that symmetric equilibria with and without price guarantees exist but price...

This paper studies a monopoly pricing problem when the seller can also choose the timing of a trade with each buyer endowed with private information about the seller’s good. A buyer’s valuation of the good is the weighted sum of his and other buyers’ private signals, and is affected by the...

Mechanisms according to which private intermediaries or governments charge transaction fees or indirect taxes are prevalent in practice. We consider a setup with multiple buyers and sellers and two-sided independent private information about valuations. We show that any weighted average of...

We propose a near-rational model of retail price adjustment consistent with microeconomic and macroeconomic evidence on price dynamics. Our framework is based on the idea that avoiding errors in decision making is costly. Given our assumed cost function for error avoidance, the timing of firms'...