The literature on product differentiation predicts that firms are likely to differentiate their products in order to relax price competition. We tested this theoretical result in a laboratory setting, by organizing twenty-four markets where products were offered with different quality levels. We...

Upstream players produce design ideas and downstream players select among these ideas to develop finished products. Design diversity is valuable at the upstream stage and coordination is valuable at the downstream stage, in the sense that this maximizes the sum of payoffs to all players....