Successful firms’ demand often exceeds capacity, generating congestion. Given innovative, high-quality products’ ramp-up costs from technological constraints or limited labor supply, a question arises: Why do successful firms not raise prices to increase revenues given excess demand? For new products and experience goods, communicating quality to consumers is challenging, and congestion may ser...

Price Competition and Reputation in Markets for Experience Goods: An Experimental Study* We experimentally examine the effects of price competition in markets for experience goods where sellers can build up reputations for quality. We compare price competition to monopolistic markets and markets where prices are exogenously fixed (somewhere between the endogenous oligopoly and monopoly prices)....

The paper deals with the competitive effects of price guarantees in a spatial duopoly where consumers can search for lower prices but have to incur hassle costs if they want to claim a price guarantee. It is shown that symmetric equilibria with and without price guarantees exist but price guarantees will have no effect on prices if search costs are low, hassle costs are high and the number of u...

Although consumer profiling advocates tout benefits from personalization, consumer advocacy groups oppose profiling in online markets because of concerns about privacy and price discrimination. Policies such as opt-out or opt-in that provide consumers the option to voluntarily participate in profiling are the favored compromise. We compare voluntary profiling to no profiling and show that volun...

We study intertemporal price discrimination when consumers can store for future consumption needs. To make the problem tractable we o¤er a simple model of demand dynamics, which we estimate using market level data. Optimal pricing involves temporary price reductions that enable sellers to discriminate between price sensitive consumers, who anticipate purchases for future consumption, and less p...

This paper presents results from an experiment on the effects of retail-price recommendations (RPRs) on consumer and retailer behavior. Despite their non-binding nature, RPRs may influence consumers’ willingness to pay by setting a reference point. Loss averse consumers will then be reluctant to pay a price higher than the recommended one. Furthermore, at a given price level consumers will dema...

Many advertisements inform the consumer about product characteristics, while others give price information with very little product information, and some provide both types of information. We propose a framework to analyze the incentives for firms to provide various types of information. We consider the case of a single seller. There is no incentive to provide information on product characteris...