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...

We compare a discriminatory pricing regime with a non-discriminatory regime in a competitive bottleneck model where content providers endogenously sort into single or multi-homers. We find that consumer prices rise when the share of single-homers increases in the non-discriminatory case, while...

Most digital content distributed in information-goods platforms encounter the threat of online piracy. Strategic pricing, technology-based platform protection, and deterrent enforcement such as legal and moral measures are viewed as antidotes to piracy. We examine the effects of deterrent...