Specialty hospitals tend to negotiate higher commercial insurance payments, even for relatively routine procedures with comparable clinical quality across hospital types. How specialty hospitals can maintain such a price premium remains an open question. In this paper, we examine a potential...

We analyze tacit collusion in an industry characterized by cyclical demand and long-run scale decisions; firms face deterministic demand cycles and choose capacity levels prior to competing in prices. Our focus is on the nature of prices. We find that two types of price wars may exist. In one,...

Search frictions can explain why the "law of one price" fails in retail markets and why even firms selling commodity products have pricing power. In online commerce, physical search costs are low, yet price dispersion is common. We use browsing data from eBay to estimate a model of consumer...

Differentiated product consumption choices made without full information can lead to welfare losses from regret and missed opportunities, but a lack of post-purchase usage data has prevented their exploration. Using novel data on individual ownership and post-purchase usage of video games, we...

I study the positive relationship between prices of tradable goods and per-capita income. I develop a highly tractable general equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and non-homothetic consumer preferences that positively links prices of tradables to consumer income....

The 2010 Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission Horizontal Merger Guidelines lay out a new standard for assessing proposed mergers in markets with differentiated products. This new standard is based on a measure of ``upward pricing pressure,'' (UPP) and the calculation of a ``gross...

This is an invited chapter for the forthcoming Volume 4 of the Handbook of Industrial Organization. We present empirical models of demand and supply in differentiated products industries with an emphasis on the key ideas arising from the recent applied literature. We start with a discussion of...

The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of varying prices, displays and information provided to consumers, facilitating both active and passive experimentation. We document the prevalence of targeted pricing and auction design variation on eBay, and identify hundreds of thousands of...

I derive a formula for the equilibrium distribution of markups in the search- theoretic model of imperfect competition of Butters (1977), Varian (1980), and Burdett and Judd (1983). The level of markups and the sign of the relationship between a seller's markup and its size depends on the extent...

This paper shows that product design shapes search frictions and that intermediaries leverage this channel to increase their rents in the context of the U.S. municipal bond market. The majority of bonds are designed via negotiations between a local government and its underwriter. They are then...