This paper studies whether a seller achieves higher profits by providing consumers with information that allows them to distinguish between products from different countries, and how mandatory provision of such information impacts welfare. We analyze a model of multi-product monopoly with...

Recent food safety events have raised concerns about adoption of traceability systems. The paper studies the question of when and why a supply chain should invest in an upstream traceability system that allows identifying which supplier is responsible for quality defects due to insufficient...

Replaced with revised version of paper 12/30/09.

We study optimal disclosure of variety by a multi-product firm with random costs. In our model there are two varieties that are horizontally differentiated and differ in overall quality, but buyers cannot distinguish between them without labels. The equilibrium prices for labeled varieties are...

This paper analyzes the optimal advertising and price policies of a monopolist who sells a new experience good over time to a population of heterogeneous forward-looking buyers. We consider informative advertising that can complement or substitute for learning-by-purchasing, and show that the...

This paper analyzes the optimal informative advertising and price policies of a monopolist who sells a new experience good over time to a population of heterogeneous buyers. Under certain conditions, the advertising rate first increases and then decreases over the marketing cycle with a peak...

This paper studies whether a seller achieves higher profits by providing consumers with information that allows them to distinguish between products from different countries, and how mandatory provision of such information impacts welfare. We analyze a model of multi-product monopoly with...