In recent years, online retailers (e-tailers) have started allowing manufacturers direct access to their customers while charging a fee for providing this access, a format commonly referred to as agency selling. In this paper, we use a stylized theoretical model to answer a key question that...

In recent decades, organized retailing has transformed the retailing landscape in emerging economies, where unorganized retailing has traditionally been dominant. In this paper, we build a theoretical model of unorganized and organized retailing in emerging economies by carefully modeling key...

The majority of theoretical vertical differentiation models in the literature derive equilibrium prices that exhibit what we call an “adverse price effect:” for a low quality firm, the equilibrium price may decrease when the product quality increases. This seemingly counterintuitive...