This paper shows the conditions for consumer sorting to be profitable. Sorting of low quality goods dampens their substitutability with high quality goods and can raise firm's profit even when sorting lowers profit from low quality sales considered alone

We show in a simple model of entry with sunk cost, that a regulator prefers limiting the output, or capacity, of the incumbent firm rather than imposing a "Minimum Quality Standard" in order to help the entrant to provide high quality. As a by-product, our analysis makes a contribution to the...

We analyze a duopoly game in which products are initially differentiated in variety and quality. Each consumer has a most preferred variety and a quality valuation. Customization provides ideal varieties but has no effect on product qualities. The firms first choose whether to customize their...

We analyze the effects of accidents and liability obligations on the incentives of car manufacturers to monopolize the markets for their spare parts. We show that monopolized markets for spare parts lead to higher overall expenditures for consumers. Furthermore, while the manufacturers invest...

This paper endogeneizes the level of market coverage in a vertically differentiated market where firms decide first their qualities and next their prices. We extend the few endogeneization results to a more realistic setup, with quality dependent unit production costs. We show that, depending on...

This paper explores in detail a price game with two potential competitors who sell products with different qualities and where unit production costs are increasing with quality. Depending on the quality combinations, many types of price equilibria configurations may exist, besides the classical...

This paper develops a model of nonlinear pricing with competition. The novel element is that each consumer's willingness to pay for quality is private information and is allowed to differ across brands. The consumer's preferences are represented by a multidimensional type containing the marginal...

Quotas act as facilitating practices under price competition. Because they relax price competition, they may affect firms' quality choice in very specific ways. We analyze this issue by considering the following stage game: a domestic government chooses an import quota, then a domestic and a...

This paper focuses on competition between an incumbent and an entrant when only the entrant's quality is unknown to (some) consumers. The incumbent may or may not know the entrant's quality. The model reveals a separating equilibrium where the entrant's high price signals its high quality when...

This paper studies effects of price floors in a simple model of vertical product differentiation. We find that even non-binding price floors can increase quality on the market, if the cost of quality is sufficiently low. Where a binding price floor does not change the equilibrium quality, it...