Retailers strive to differentiate themselves from competitors to avoid commoditization and consequent price competition, using tools such as store location, store layout, and product assortment. However, such tools become ineffective on the Internet, where competitors are a few clicks away, where web page design can be easily imitated, and where online shoppers can browse a variety of product c...

We consider a firm that produces a specialty or a branded image good, where consumers derive part of their utility from the eliteness of the brand’s image and exclusivity of the product. Once high valuation consumers have purchased the product, it is optimal for the firm to reduce the price and capture lower valuation consumers. However, this dilutes the exclusivity of the brand, and results in...

We study the offers submitted by consumers to a large Name-Your-Own-Price (NYOP) online retailer. A distinctive feature of this retailer is that it allows consumers to repeatedly submit offers on one and the same product. While consumers could identify the threshold price (the minimum price for which the retailer is willing to sell) by incrementing their offer in small steps in each consecutive...

Price comparison sites have become an increasingly popular way to shop online. Yet, even though consumers have complete access to the list of prices for apparently identical products offered on these sites, persistent price dispersion has been widely observed. One important theoretical explanation for this phenomenon comes from clearinghouse models of price dispersion. These models predict that...

This paper presents a model in which some consumers shop on the basis of price alone, without attention to product quality. A firm may “cheat” (i.e., cut quality) to exploit these inattentive consumers. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, firms follow a mixed strategy involving both price and quality dispersion. Firms are less likely to cheat when there are fewer inattentive consumers, which i...

This paper considers vertical restraints in the context of an intrabrand competition model in which a single manufacturer deals with two vertically differentiated retailers. We establish two main results. First, if the market cannot be vertically segmented, the manufacturer will foreclose the low quality retailer either directly by dealing exclusively with the high quality retailer, or indirect...