This paper examines how a firm can strategically choose its capacity to manipulate consumer beliefs about aggregate demand. It looks at a market with social effects where consumers want to do what is popular, to buy what they believe others want to buy. By imposing a capacity constraint and...

We conduct a laboratory experiment where groups of 4 subjects constrained to obtain at most one good each, sequentially bid for three goods in first and second price auctions. Subjects learn at the beginning of each auction their valuation for the good and exit the auction once they have...

In a capacity-then-price-setting game we experimentally identify capacity precommitment, the possibility to communicate before price choices, and prior competition experience as crucial factors for collusive pricing. The theoretical analysis determines the capacity thresholds above which firms...