Minimum quality standards (MQS) constitute an important regulatory tool that can be used to raise product qualities, to benefit consumers and to increase market participation. One of the main assumptions in the existing literature is that firms must comply with standards. Nevertheless, in many...

There are examples of entry in two-sided markets, where first entrants occupy a ‘central location’ and serve agents with ‘intermediate tastes,’ while later entrants are niche players. Why would the first entrant choose to become a ‘general’ platform, given that later entrants will...

This paper surveys the formation of the US shipping cartels (conferences) and their state of development before the onset of World War I. These cartels ranged from simple price agreements to very complex and tight revenue pooling agreements. The focus of the paper is to identify the factors that...

The advent of the Internet has revolutionized the way companies advertise, develop and distribute products. Firms can now customize their advertising messages and products to the particular characteristics and needs of customers. Customers themselves can create their own products. We investigate...

We develop an upstream-downstream model to analyze downstream firms' incentives to bundle. In our framework, the upstream firms are content providers (such as television stations) and the downstream firms are system operators (such as cable/satellite operators). We show that an a la carte...

The recent rapid growth of the Internet as a medium of communication and commerce, combined with the development of sophisticated software tools, are to a large extent responsible for producing a new kind of information: databases with detailed records about consumers' preferences. These...

Recent developments in information technology (IT) have resulted in the collection of a vast amount of customer-specific data. As IT advances, the quality of such information improves. We analyze a unifying spatial price discrimination model that encompasses the two most studied paradigms of...

We introduce a flexible third-degree price discrimination framework by modeling the information firms possess about consumers' locations (preferences) on the Salop circle as a partition. Higher information quality is translated into a partition refinement. In the limit, we obtain the perfect...

We consider a market where each firm is created by the combination of two complementary assets that are heterogeneous in their productivity. After assets match endogenously, their owners choose between two ownership structures: integration and non-integration. Our main focus is on the interplay...