In this paper, a dominant supplier and competitive fringe supply goods to a common buyer who has private information about the state of demand. We give conditions under which market-share contracts are profitable, and we show that, in some cases, the full-information outcome can be obtained...

Many retailers promise that they will not be undersold by rivals (price-matching guarantees) and extend their promise to include their own future prices (most-favored-customer clauses). This is puzzling because the extant literature has shown that each promise independently has the potential to...

An upstream supplier that is constrained both by downstream competition and the threat of demand-side substitution faces a tradeoff between maximizing joint-profit and extracting surplus. Although joint-profit maximization calls for relatively high marginal wholesale prices in order to dampen...

We consider a two-period model with two sellers and one buyer. Although we assume it is efficient for the buyer to purchase from both sellers in each period, we show that when the buyer's valuations are inter-temporally linked and at least one seller is financially constrained, exclusion can...

Many low-price guarantees are offered by small local firms who compete against much larger rivals. The prices of these larger rivals are often set nationally and thus are independent of local market conditions. Our objective in this paper is to explain why small firms in such environments might...