We study the optimal behaviour of a cartel faced with fringe competition and imperfectly attentive consumers. Intertemporal price dispersion obfuscates consumer price comparison which aids the cartel through two channels: it reduces the effectiveness of free riding by the fringe; and it relaxes...

Workhorse economic models used for studying the market impacts of search frictions assume constant search costs: individuals pay the same cost to obtain price information each time they search. This paper provides evidence on a new form of search costs: startup costs. Exploiting a natural...

Many movie markets are characterised by extensive uniform pricing practices, hampering the ability to estimate price elasticities of demand. Australia presents a rare exception, with most cinemas offering cheap Tuesday ticket prices. We exploit this feature to estimate a random coefficients...

This paper studies equilibrium selection in the retail gasoline industry. We exploit a unique dataset that contains the universe of station-level prices for an urban market for 15 years, and that encompasses a coordinated equilibrium transition mid-sample. We uncover a gradual, three-year...

We examine dynamic search as a game in which two rivals explore (an island) for a hidden prize of known value. In every period until its discovery, the players decide how much of the unsearched area to comb. If a player finds the prize alone he wins it and the game ends. Players have a...

The price commitment model of Maskin and Tirole (1988) provides an extensively cited foundation for Edgeworth cycles. We examine the viability of Edgeworth cycles when price commitment is partial in the sense that a subset of firms are committed to price in each period. If multiple firms are not...