Do firms respond to cost shocks by reducing the quality of their products? Using microdata from a large Russian retailer that refreshes its product line twice-yearly, we document that higher quality products are more profitable than lower quality ones, but that the number of high quality...

The intensive development of global markets correlated with the modern consumer’s demands led to a new complex approach concerning the food sector and its’ main determinants. Old market theories that describe the food market mechanisms as a simple three point process: “to produce – to...

This paper addresses the concept of quality risk in outsourcing. Recent trends in outsourcing extend a contract manufacturer's (CM's) responsibility to several functional areas such as research and development and design in addition to manufacturing. This trend enables an original equipment...

In many industries, product design and manufacturing lead-times are sufficiently long that both the quality level of a product and the amount of inventory produced must be determined before a firm knows what the actual demand will be. In this paper, we conduct a theoretical analysis of such a...

This paper analyzes the endogenous choice of delegation with two firms producing goods of different qualities. We find that an asymmetric delegation structure emerges as the high-quality firm chooses to delegate and low-quality firm chooses non delegation contract under Cournot competition. Even...

This paper studies content strategies for online publishers of digital information goods. It examines sampling strategies and compares their performance to paid content and free content strategies. A sampling strategy, where some of the content is offered for free and consumers are charged for...

During the last two decades, bundling has become a hot topic for Industrial Organization economists, mainly as a result of legal actions against Microsoft (Crampes and Hollander 2007). In this spirit, the literature has thus far focused on asymmetric settings where one firm holds a monopoly for...

Network performance measurements from OECD countries between 2007 and 2012 document a significant increase in the variability of broadband infrastructure quality, which helps explain growing demand for technologies and policies that counteract information asymmetries between network operators...

Alliances between competitors where an established firm provides access to its marketing and distribution channels are an important real-world phenomenon. We analyze a market where an established firm, firm A, produces a product of well-known quality, and a firm with an unknown brand, firm B,...

This paper examines, both theoretically and empirically, how the presence of FDI affects product quality of domestic firms through worker mobility. Heterogeneous firms are faced with a monopolistically competitive product market and labour markets of production workers and quality control...