This paper explores the impact of product liability on vertical product differentiation when product safety is perfectly observable. In a two-stage competition, duopolistic firms are subject to strict liability and segment the market such that a low-safety product is marketed at a low price to...

This paper explores the impact of product liability on vertical product differentiation when product safety is perfectly observable. In a two-stage competition, duopolistic firms are subject to strict liability and segment the market such that a low-safety product is marketed at a low price to...

We consider a situation of duopolistic competition in which one firm may (falsely) advertise high product quality. Consumers are heterogeneous. One group forms rational beliefs about quality, whereas some consumers are naive and fully trust any advertisement. We compare two scenarios in which...

Rules of consumer protection or fair competition can be publicly or privately enforced. We consider the possibility of false advertising by a firm in duopolistic competition where consumers can be distinguished according to whether or not they form rational beliefs about the trustworthiness of...

Countries rely on different public and private agents to enforce consumer protection and fair competition regulations. To analyze the repercussions of different regimes on social welfare, we consider the possibility of false advertising by a firm in an environment with duopolistic competition...

We analyze collusive outcomes under different pricing schemes in a differentiated product market in which customers have elastic demand. Starting with a situation in which firms can set two‐part tariffs to price discriminate, we consider two policy interventions that ban price discrimination:...

We consider a horizontally differentiated oligopoly and investigate the relationship between merger cost savings and network effects for the incentives of firms to merge and for the postmerger welfare outcomes. We show that it is more profitable to be an insider rather than an outsider of the...

This paper studies the impact of software piracy in a two-sidedmarket setting. Software platforms attract developers and users to maximize their profits. The equilibrium price structure is affected by piracy: license fees to developers are higher with more software protection but the impact on...

This paper revisits the optimal entry decision in a differentiated product market where customer demand is price-sensitive and depends on a per-unit transport cost. We show that too few firms may enter for high entry cost and high transport cost compared to the socially optimal outcome.

This paper studies the impact of software piracy on prominent and non-prominent software developers in markets based on a two-sided platform business. Consumer behavior is imperfect and, when adopting a platform, consumers only take prominent software into account. We show that prominent...