When reservation-based service differentiation is offered in an IP network, it is crucial for a network provider to appropriately charge for service invocations. For internal calculation as well as external price representation, a notion of costs and prices for communication services is needed. In this paper, general requirements for cost and price calculation are analysed for packetswitched mu...

Title of Dissertation: ESSAYS ON ADVERTISING AND PRICE COLLUSION Kartikeya Singh, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Deborah Minehart University of Maryland, College Park Chapter I: Persuasive advertising alters consumers’ tastes and creates brand loyalty. The established view in the economics literature is that such advertising is anti-competitive and results in higher pr...

This paper examines the competitiveness of winner-take-all price competition in homogeneous product oligopoly environments where underlying buyer demands and/or firms’ costs need not be continuous. Our analysis is motivated by the observation that a variety of economic settings have these features. For example, in 1996 an Ivy League university solicited bids from several vendors for its initiat...

According to static models of industrial organization, a rise in competition decreases prices. In this paper, I test whether this conclusion can be reversed in the mobile telecommunications markets where dynamic e ciency e ects might be signi cant. The empirical test relies on the change in the intensity of competition introduced by the entry of the fourth mobile operator in France and the merg...

We study Hotelling’s classic duopoly location model in continuous time with flow payoffs accumulated over time and the price dimension made explicit. In an experimental setting, subjects chose price and location in treatments varying only by the speed of adjustment. We find that the principle of minimum differentiation generally holds, with little distance between subjects’ location decisions. ...

We explore the case for monopolistic price flexibility in a linear setting. With different marginal costs, by changing the production mix price differentiation can improve welfare and also aggregate consumer surplus even if total output does not increase (as in the linear case). This depends on the variability of cost and demand parameters, and on their correlation. We also show that the welfar...

We analyse the effects of predation in a vertical differentiation model, where the highquality incumbent is able to price discriminate while the low-quality entrant sets a uniform price. The incumbent may act as a predator, that is, it may price below its marginal costs on a subset of consumers to induce the rival’s exit. We show that the entrant may adopt an aggressive attitude to make predati...

Price dispersion among commodity goods is typically attributed to consumer search costs. We explore the magnitude of consumer search costs using a data set obtained from a major Internet shopbot. For the median consumer, the benefits to searching lower screens are $2.24 while the cost of an exhaustive search of the offers is a maximum of $2.03. Interestingly, in our setting, consumers who searc...

Professors Nasser and Turcic designed a model using game theory to analyze different types of firms, their supply chain options, and the choices they make when it comes to controlling output. Firms fall into one of three categories based on product differentiation in their industry: low, intermediate, or high product differentiation. Findings show that competing firms in an industry with low pr...