One striking development associated with the explosion of e-commerce is the increased transparency of sellers' quality history. In this paper we analyze how this affects firms' incentives to invest in quality when the outcome of investment is uncertain. We identify two conflicting effects. On...

If producers have more information than consumers about goods' attributes, then they may use non-price (rather than price) adjustment mechanisms and, consequently, the market may reach a new equilibrium even if prices remain sticky. We study a situation where producers adjust the quantity (per...

This paper shows that prices may be sticky when buyers must search to determine the current market price and there is uncertainty about the expected duration of cost changes. Specifically, during periods when costs, and hence prices are high, low valuation consumers optimally stop searching and...

Empirical evidence suggests that prices are sticky with respect to cost changes. Moreover, prices respond more rapidly to cost increases than to cost decreases. We develop a search theoretic model which is consistent with this evidence and allows for additional testable predictions. Our results...

We analyze the marketing strategies of vertically differentiated firms when consumers observe their performance on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firms simultaneously decide the price, advertising intensity and the investment in CSR. While advertising increases consumers' perception...

We study the properties of a profit-maximizing monopolist's optimal price distribution when selling to a loss-averse consumer, where (following Koszegi and Rabin (2006)) we assume that the consumer's reference point is her recent rational expectations about the purchase. If it is close to...

This research builds on the complementary corporate social responsibility (CSR) literatures in strategy and marketing to provide insight into the efficacy of CSR as a challenger's competitive weapon against a market leader. Through an investigation of a real world CSR initiative, we show that...

This paper shows that privacy concerns in commercial contexts are not solely driven by a desire to control the transmission of personal information or to avoid intrusive direct marketing campaigns. When they express privacy concerns, consumers anticipate indirect economic consequences of data...

Die Wahl des passenden Parfüms ist eine sehr persönliche, emotional gesteuerte Konsumentenentscheidung. Im hart umkämpften Parfümmarkt müssen sich Unternehmen vor den rational zu treffenden Entscheidungen über die Ausgestaltung des Marketing-Mix intensiv mit den zielgruppenrelevanten...

A long tradition suggests a fundamental distinction between situations of risk, where true objective probabilities are known, and unmeasurable uncertainties where no such probabilities are given. This distinction can be captured in a Bayesian model where uncertainty is represented by the agent's...