We estimate the effect of Internet on the volume of used car transactions. From 1997 to 2007, Internet use tripled in California, causing an increase in volume-of-trade of 7.2 %. This implies a substantial welfare gain via improved allocative efficiency.

A decision maker offers a new product to a number of potential adopers. He does not know the value of the product, but adopers receive some private information about it. We study how the decision maker may influence learning among adopers by manipulaing the launch sequence when both the decision...

We explain why a durable-goods monopolist would like to create a shortage during the launch phase of a new product. We argue that this incentive arises from the presence of a second-hand market and uncertainty about consumers׳ willingness to pay for the good. Consumers are heterogeneous and...

type="main" <p>We show FC-MNL is flexible in the sense of Diewert ([Diewert, E., 1974]), thus its parameters can be chosen to match a well-defined class of possible own- and cross-price elasticities of demand. In contrast to models such as Probit and Random Coefficient-MNL models, FC-MNL does not...</p>

Sales are a widespread and well-known phenomenon documented in several product markets. This paper presents a novel rationale for sales that does not rely on consumer heterogeneity, or on any form of randomness to explain such periodic price fluctuations. The analysis is carried out in the...