Buyer-Size Discounts and Inflation Dynamics

Group Discounts Compatible with Buyer Privacy

We show how group discounts can be offered without forcing buyers to surrender their anonymity, as long as buyers can use their own computing devices (e.g. smartphone, tablet or computer) to perform a purchase. Specifically, we present a protocol for privacy-preserving group discounts. The protocol allows a group of buyers to prove how many they are without disclosing their identities. Coupled ...

Robust Exclusion Through Loyalty Discounts With Buyer Commitment

Buyer Size and Bargaining Power:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) initiated a proceeding in 2002 to examine whether and to what extent cable operators should be limited in the number of subscribers they can serve. This paper reports on the performance of experimental (laboratory) markets designed to be similar in structure and practice to the market where cable operators negotiate affiliate fees with various program...

Inflation Dynamics and Inflation Regimes

In this paper we develop and estimate a new-Keynesian model of inflation and use it to investigate the hypothesis that prices in the UK are re-set more frequently during periods of high inflation. In the model, firms are assumed to condition their expectations on an optimally-selected but incomplete information set and we further assume that the probability that they will reset their price in a...

Do Buyer-Size Discounts Depend on the Curvature of the Surplus Function? Experimental Tests of Bargaining Models

A number of recent theoretical papers have shown that for buyer-size discounts to emerge in a bargaining model, the total surplus function over which parties bargain must have certain nonlinearities. We test the theory in an experimental setting in which a seller bargains with a number of buyers of different sizes. We generate nonlinearities in the surplus function by varying the shape of the s...