In a market where sellers are heterogeneous with respect of the quality of their good and are more informed than buyers, high quality sellers’ chances to trade might depend on their ability to inform buyers about the quality of the goods they offer. We study how the strength of competition among sellers affects the ability of sellers of high quality goods to achieve communication by means of ap...

the concept of countervailing power is a term to describe the situation in which the market power of one side (sellers) may be balanced by the market power of another side(buyers) in a given market. the purpose of this paper is to test this hypothesis and to determine whether the market power of sellers has had a restraining influence on increases in buyer market power in iran’s large industrie...

This paper examines a simple model of outsourcing involving matching frictions and home bias in firms’ acquisition of intermediate goods. Two groups of seller firms—local sellers and foreign sellers—may face different degrees of search frictions even though they are identical in terms of productivity. Two groups of buyer firms are considered: one group accepts local and foreign sellers equally,...

We consider repeated pricing games in which two competing sellers use mathematical models to choose the prices of their products. Over the sequence of games, each seller attempts to estimate the values of the parameters of a demand model that expresses demand as a function only of its own price using data comprised only of its own past prices and demand realizations. Thus, as is often the case ...

We consider sequential competition among sellers, with different consumers desiring the good at different times. Each consumer has the option of buying from a later seller. Each seller recognizes that future sellers are potential competitors. We find that if sellers do not know the previous history of sales, then an equilibrium price is necessarily the same as that which would be set by a simpl...

We study a model where multiple sellers with limited supply strategically choose both the price formation rule and the allocation rule. We show that inefficiency in this setting arises both because sellers withhold the good and because they sell to lower valuation buyers despite the presence of higher valuation buyers. This contrasts with the findings of the literatures on monopolistic and comp...

Sales by small volume sellers are systematically undercounted in public and private surveys of ecommerce. The twin results are that the contribution of small sellers to the ecommerce marketplace is considerably larger than generally assumed and the overall market is larger by this difference. As the costs of selling things online have fallen with cheaper equipment and communications fees, and w...