We consider a model of vertical competition where downstream firms (retailers) purchase an upstream input from a monopolist and are able to differentiate from each other in terms of quality. Our primary focus is to study the effects of introducing a large retailer, such as a Wal-Mart...

The model in which an individual maximizes his total ordinal or cardinal utility subject to his budget constraint is a paradigm of individual choice theory in economics. The advantage of ordinal utility theory is that utility is immeasurable, but it is inconsistent with common sense, for...