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...

We characterize mixed-strategy equilibria in a setting with capacity constrained suppliers which can charge location based prices to different customers. The equilibrium prices weakly increase in the transport distance between supplier and customer, whereas the margins decrease. Despite prices...

We consider consumer entry in the canonical monopolistic nonlinear pricing model ( Mussa and Rosen 1978) wherein consumers learn their preference “types” after incurring privately known entry costs. We show that by taking into account consumer entry, the nature of optimal nonlinear pricing...

While second-degree price discrimination is standard in commercial practice in many industries, consumer advocates and public interest groups have reacted with skepticism against tendencies to move away from flat rates and introduce greater tariff diversity. This paper provides an empirical...

Two firms engage in price competition to attract buyers located on a network. The value of the good of either firm to any buyer depends on the number of neighbors on the network who adopt the same good. When the size of externalities increases linearly with the number of adoptions, we identify...

In many markets insurers are barred from price discrimination based on con- sumer characteristics like age, gender, and medical history. In this paper, I build on a recent literature to show why such policies are inefficient if consumers differ in their willingness-to-pay for insurance...

I investigate a simple model of advance-purchase contracts as a mode of financing costly projects. An entrepreneur has to meet some capital requirement in order to start production and sell the related good to a limited number of potential buyers who are privately informed about their...

We investigate the effect of a ban on third-degree price discrimination on the sustainability of collusion. We build a model with two firms that may be able to discriminate between two consumer groups. Two cases are analyzed: (i) Best-response symmetries so that profits in the static Nash...

When products are sold in advance, i.e. prior to consumption, consumers trade off an early, uninformed purchase at a low price against a late, informed purchase at a high price. This paper considers the effect of market structure on the prevalence of advance selling. We show that in an...

We study centralized many-to-many matching in markets where agents have private information about (vertical) characteristics that determine match values. Our analysis reveals how matching patterns reflect cross-subsidization between sides. Agents are endogenously partitioned into consumers and...

We study optimal price discrimination when a monopolist faces a continuum of consumers with reference-dependent preferences. A consumer's valuation for product quality consists of an intrinsic valuation affected by a private state signal (type), and a gain-loss valuation that depends on...

Studies employing micro price data to examine the extent of international goods market integration tend to find that borders induce arbitrage-impeding transaction costs which contribute to segment national markets. Analyzing household scanner price data from the three euro area countries...

We posit and empirically test the hypothesis that airlines are able to charge a fare premium in markets that originate in their domestic country relative to similar markets that originate in foreign countries. To this end, we focus on intercontinental one-stop air travel trips for which the...

Using a model of horizontal differentiation where a variety dimension is added to Hotelling's (1929) "linear city" duopoly model, I show that even when costs and demand are symmetric, price discrimination may be an equilibrium phenomenon. In the model each customer have a preferred variety and a...

In recent decades, New World has increased its wine export to European markets and became considerable in the global wine competition. However, the export share of traditional wine producers has decreased; Europe still remained market leader on world wine market. Moreover, the global wine market...

In this study, we investigate behavioral constraints on pricing by using a novel laboratory experiment in which actual consumption goods are traded. We test different models and provide several insights into pricing and reactions to price discrimination. First, we identify the extent to which...

Online review aggregators, such as TripAdvisor, HotelClub and OpenTable help consumers identify the products and services that best match their preferences. The goal of this study is to understand the impact of online review aggregators on firms and consumers. We adopt Salop's circular city...

This thesis consists of three independent contributions in the area of microeconomic theory. All three contributions share the feature of agents holding multidimensional private information which motivates the title of the thesis. Part 1, entitled “Consistency and Communication in...

I investigate a simple model of advance-purchase contracts as a mode of financing costly projects. The analysis can easily be reinterpreted as a model of the monopolistic provision of excludable public goods under private information. An entrepreneur has to meet some capital requirement in order...

We study a seller's optimal mechanism for maximizing revenue when a buyer may present evidence relevant to her value. We show that a condition very close to transparency of buyer segments is necessary and sufficient for the optimal mechanism to be deterministic--hence akin to classic third...