Consumers learn their valuation for most goods and services sooner than the price or availability. In such markets, optimal of each firm falls in search cost consumers, despite exit lower-value consumers when becomes costlier. The reason is that a greater causes inframarginal to instead switching firms. marginal respond less may become more numerous. elastic demand raises prices. At high enough...

The introduction of participatory rating mechanisms on online sales platforms has had substantial impact on firms’ sales and profits. In this note, we develop a dynamic model of consumer influences on ratings and of rating influences on consumers, focussing on standard five-star mechanisms as implemented bymany platforms. The key components of our social influence model are the consumer trust i...

In the monopoly nonlinear pricing problem with unobservable consumer types, we study mechanisms in which the firm makes the set of consumer options conditional on the aggregate reports of consumer types it receives. Previous mechanisms that exploit knowledge of the true type distribution often have multiple equilibria or use noncredible contracts off the equilibrium path. When the monopolist ca...

In the monopoly nonlinear pricing problem with unobservable consumer types, we study mechanisms in which the firm makes the set of consumer options conditional on the aggregate reports of consumer types it receives. Previous mechanisms that exploit knowledge of the true type distribution often have multiple equilibria or use noncredible contracts off the equilibrium path. When the monopolist ca...

Accounting for desire for variety within the consumer demand function, a two stage hybrid competitive-cooperative game analyzes di¤erentiated oligopolies under varying market structures from competition through pooling contracts up to anti-trust immune alliances. From a managerial perspective, pooling agreements not only bene…t …rms by better matching supply and demand but also rank highest in ...

The water resource literature documents the solution that community water system regionalization (CWSR) offers, based on economies of scale, to challenges small community water systems (CWSs) face born of financial distress. But in practice very few systems actually regionalize. Imposing a model based on economies of scale, this paper estimates stakeholder implications to consumers and water pu...

personalize radio stations. The main data sources of the case study are three interviews, which are analyzed by applying the technique of pattern matching. The results show that some hypotheses are supported by the empirical data, and some are not. The case studies show that companies should follow a mass customization strategy where consumers are involved early in the design and fabrication pr...

This paper studies the strategic and welfare effects of the “failing firm defense” in declining markets with differentiated products. All solvent firms prefer a clearing of the rescue merger to the failing firm exiting the market. The failing firm defense increases consumer surplus, since the benefit from maintained product variety outweighs the cost of higher prices that result from the merger...

In this paper, we develop a differentiated duopoly model with endogenous cost-reducing R&D and review the argument on welfare effect of price and quantity competition in the presence of technology licensing. We show that the standard conclusion on duopoly (Singh and Vives, 1984) can be completely reversed. Cournot competition induces lower R&D investment than Bertrand competition does. Moreover...