A commonly observed two-stage pricing strategy for a custom-made product involves a prepurchase entry fee for a potential consumer and a purchase price if he decides to buy the product. We solve and compare two settings: In the first, the firm does not commit in advance to the second-stage price and in the second, the firm does. We show that without a commitment mechanism, the two price points ...

Abstract   his study employs a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model to investigate the macroeconomic shocks on Malaysian tourism industry, especially how the economy dynamically responds to oil price shocks, exchange rates, changes in price level, exports, economic growth and tourism income during the study time period from January 2001 to December 2012. The results indicate that oil...

Frictionless e-commerce implies that price dispersion for identical products sold by various etailers should be smaller than it is offline, but some recent empirical evidence reveals the opposite. A study by Smith et al. (2000) suggests that such a phenomenon may be due to heterogeneity among etailers in such factors as shopping convenience, consumer awareness, and trust. These hypotheses, howe...

This paper revisits the traditional view that a low-price guarantee results in higher prices and facilitates collusion. I acquired accurate data on matching stores and their competitors to address the common criticism of the scant existing empirical literature that their results are highly dependent on getting the market de nitions right. Using station level data in the retail gasoline industry...

This paper studies the implications of consumer reference dependence for market competition. If consumers take some product (e.g., the first product they consider) as the reference point when evaluating others and exhibit loss aversion, then the more “prominent” firm whose product is taken as the reference point by more consumers will randomize over a high and a low price. Relative to the stand...

This paper uses revealed preference inequalities to provide the tightest possible (best) nonparametric bounds on predicted consumer responses to price changes using consumer-level data over a finite set of relative price changes. These responses are allowed to vary nonparametrically across the income distribution. This is achieved by combining the theory of revealed preference with the semipara...

This paper uses revealed preference inequalities to provide the tightest possible (best) nonparametric bounds on predicted consumer responses to price changes using consumer-level data over a finite set of relative price changes. These responses are allowed to vary nonparametrically across the income distribution. This is achieved by combining the theory of revealed preference with the semipara...

We introduce consumer loss aversion into the Salop (1979) model of price competition with differentiated products. Firms face uncertain costs of production, and after observing their own cost realizations simultaneously set prices. A consumer derives “gain-loss utility” from comparing the purchase price and her satisfaction with the acquired product to her recent expectations regarding the same...

This paper details the usage of online communities to influence consumer price sensitivity for expensive, medium, and low cost products by formulating a research instrument, which is accomplished through an extensive literature review of price effects prevalent in the online domain. The research study further examines the impact of reference price effect, difficult comparison effect, price qual...