In markets where consumers have switching costs and firms cannot price discriminate, firms have two conflicting strategies. A firm can either offer a low price to attract new consumers and build future market share or a firm can offer a high price to exploit the partial lock-in of their existing...

Industry concentration and corporate profit rates have increased, in the United States, over the past two decades. This paper investigates the welfare implications of economic activity concentrating within a few firms that hold market power. I develop a general equilibrium model that features...

Empirical models of demand for -- and, often, supply of -- differentiated products are widely used in practice, typically employing parametric functional forms and distributions of consumer heterogeneity. We review some recent work studying identification in a broad class of such models. This...

Consumers often incur costs when switching from one product to another. Recently there has been renewed debate within the literature about whether these switching costs lead to higher prices. We build a theoretical model of dynamic competition and solve it analytically for a wide range of...

We analyze a dynamic durable good oligopoly model where sellers are capacity constrained over the length of the game. Buyers act strategically in the market, knowing that their purchases may affect future prices. The model is examined when there is one and multiple buyers. Sellers choose their...

Recent theoretical models of network competition with call externalities demonstrate strategic incentives of incumbent providers to reduce receiver benefits in rival network by excessive off-net pricing. Such anti-competitive pricing practices have a potentially damaging impact on financial...

We investigate how costly acquisition and exchange of customer-specific information affects industry profit and consumer welfare. Consumers differ in their preferences for competing brands and in their switching costs between brands. Brand-producing firms use their acquired knowledge of...

This article analyses the pricing policy equilibria emerging in a duopoly when one firm may choose whether to engage in behaviour-based price discrimination or uniform pricing while the rival price discriminates. The question we address is: should a firm price discriminate when facing a price...

This paper studies a dynamic two-sided market in which consumers face switching costs between competing products. I first show that, in a symmetric equilibrium, switching costs lower the first-period price if network externalities are strong. By contrast, switching costs soften price competition...

We investigate how costly acquisition and exchange of customer-specific information affects industry profit and consumer welfare. Consumers differ in their preferences for competing brands and in their switching costs between brands. Brand-producing firms use their acquired knowledge of...