Managing merchants challenges a selling platform. Using a multi-sender framework we ask if a platform and a competing merchant’s prices can together signal product quality if consumers’ information is incomplete. We find that both separating and pooling equilibria exist but for separation...

Merchants are wary of a platform entering as a competitor and adversely affecting sales and margins. A platform wanting to maximize profits is interested also in gaining consumer trust and confidence by providing credible quality information to consumers. As a practical matter, could a...

An examination of brand prices in several categories reveals that the distribution of prices is multimodal, with firms offering shallow and deep discounts. Another interesting feature of these distributions is that they may have holes in the interior of the support. These pricing distributions...

Price discrimination is generally thought to improve firm profits by allowing firms to extract more consumer surplus. In competition, however, price discrimination may also be costly to the firm because restrictive incentive compatibility conditions may allow the competing firm to gain market...

Increased sales due to promotions could be at the expense of competitors: such sales come from consumers with relatively weak brand preferences. However, increased sales from brand loyal consumers could well cannibalize sales of the promoted brand. An unintended consequence of promotions is that...