Consumers can acquire information through their own search efforts or through their social network. Information diffusion via word-of-mouth communication leads to some consumers free-riding on their “friends” and less information acquisition via active search. Free-riding also has an...

In this paper we analyze empirically whether and if so to what extent later entrants in the European mobile telephony industry have a disadvantage vis-a-vis incumbents and early mover entrants. To analyze this question we consider a series of static models and a dynamic model of market share...

Asymmetric information about product quality can create incentives for a privately informed manufacturer to sell to uninformed consumers through a retailer and to maintain secrecy of upstream pricing. By delegating retail price setting to an intermediary the manufacturer can hide information...

This paper develops an economic argument relating auctions to high market prices. At the core of the argument is the claim that market competition and bidding in an auction should be analyzed as part of one game, where the pricing strategies in the market subgame depend on the bidding strategies...

This paper examines the effect of price matching guarantees (PMGs) in a sequential search model. PMGs are simultaneously chosen with prices and some consumers (shoppers) know the firms' decisions before buying, while others (non-shoppers) enter a shop first before observing a firm's price and...