Brand selection - the number of alternative brands of a particular product - is a double-edged sword in that on the one hand it increases rivalry and so stimulates price competition but on the other hand it causes consumers to be poorly informed and thus vulnerable to exploitation and so dampens...

The fact that product differentiation can cause price dispersion - price differences between alternative brands of what are seemingly identical products - is not surprising. Our contribution is to establish not whether, but how, it does so. We explore the mechanisms involved using a variant of...