We analyze the effect of different pricing schemes on horizontally differentiated firms' ability to sustain collusion when customers have the possibility to combine (or mix) products to achieve a better match of their preferences. To this end, we compare two-part tariffs with linear prices and...

An imperfectly-informed regulator needs to procure multiple units of some good (e.g., green energy, market liquidity, pollution reduction, land conservation) that can be produced with heterogeneous technologies at various costs. How should she optimally procure these units? Should she run...

This paper studies static rational inattention problems with multiple actions and multiple shocks. We solve for the optimal signals chosen by agents and provide tools to interpret information processing. By relaxing restrictive assumptions previously used to gain tractability, we allow agents...

Platforms often use fee discrimination within their marketplace (e.g., Amazon, eBay, and Uber specify a variety of merchant fees). To better understand the impact of marketplace fee discrimination, we develop a model that allows us to determine equilibrium fee and category decisions that depend...

The unprecedented access of firms to consumer level data facilitates more precisely targeted individual pricing. We study the incentives of a data broker to sell data about a segment of the market to three competing firms. The segment only includes a share of the consumers in the market around...

This article studies the effects of consumer information on the intensity of competition. In a two dimensional duopoly model of horizontal product differentiation, firms use consumer information to price discriminate. I contrast a full privacy and a no privacy benchmark with intermediate regimes...

We aim to evaluate two different econometric screens for identifying anti-competitive behavior in the fuel retail market: (i) The Markov-Switching GARCH (MS-GARCH) Models; (ii) The Local Gaussian Correlation (LGC) approach. Using the gasoline cartel judged and condemned in Brasília as a...

The paper considers a duopoly model in which firms inherited asymmetric market shares and history-based price discrimination is viable. However, firms can identify only a share of their own consumers depending to the degree of information accuracy. We derive the pricing strategies and we analyze...

This paper studies regulatory policy interventions aimed at protecting sticky consumers who are exposed to exploitation. We model heterogeneous consumer switching costs alongside asymmetric market shares. This setting encompasses many markets in which established firms are challenged by new...

A durable good monopolist faces a continuum of heterogeneous customers who make purchase decisions by comparing present and expected price-quality offers. The monopolist designs a sequence of price-quality menus to segment the market. We consider the Markov Perfect Equilibrium (MPE) of a game...

We study a unique dataset with comprehensive coverage of daily prices in large multi-product retailers in Israel. Retail stores synchronize price changes around occasional "peak" days when they reprice around 10% of their products. To assess aggregate implications of partial price...

With the advent of big data, unique opportunities arise for data collection and analysis and thus for personalized pricing. We simulate a self-learning algorithm setting personalized prices based on additional information about consumer sensitivities in order to analyze market outcomes for...

This article provides a tractable model of inter-temporal price-discrimination by heterogeneous firms, imperative for our understanding of advance purchase markets in the wake of entry. The pricing schedule of a more efficient entrant is found to differ systematically from the pricing schedule...

A monopolist producing vertically differentiated durable goods can offer in each period a sequence of price-quality menus to segment the market. We show that, contrary to the Coase conjecture for the homogeneous durable good monopoly, thanks to the ability to produce differentiated durable...

We introduce consumers with intrinsic privacy preferences into the monopolistic non-linear pricing model. Next to classical consumers, there is a share of data-sensitive consumers who incur a privacy cost if their purchase reveals information to the monopolist. The monopolist discriminates...

This paper analyzes price discrimination of an upstream cartel in the presence of a dominant firm at the retail level. Charging different wholesale prices creates a bond between the upstream cartel and the favored downstream firm. This bond reduces or eliminates this firm's incentives to accept...

The advent of big data analytics has favoured the emergence of forms of price discrimination based on consumers' profiles and their online behaviour (i.e. personalised pricing). The paper analyses this practice as a possible exploitative abuse by dominant online platforms. The paper argues that,...

We analyse the effects of input price discrimination in the canonical model where an upstream monopolist sells to downstream firms with various degrees of efficiency. We first recast a series of existing results within our setting, extending previous findings related to discrimination in...

The impacts of the Lifeline subsidy on high-speed Internet access, prices and welfare are evaluated. Counterfactuals from a differentiated-product model of competition between cable and telephone firms show the $9.25 subsidy is a positive incentive but the share of low-income households in the...

Behavior-based pricing (BBP) refers to the practice in which firms collect consumers' purchase history data, recognize repeat and new consumers from the data, and offer them different prices. BBP is a prevalent practice for firms and a worldwide concern for consumers. Extant research has...

Weyl and Fabinger (2013) analyze the social incidence of competition and theoutput and welfare effects of third-degree price discrimination by considering thehypothetical entrance of exogenous quantity into a market. The formulas they use forthis purpose, however, are correct only for marginal...

We study a firm's product design, distribution, and pricing problem when it is presented with the opportunity to enter a foreign market. Specifically, we focus on identifying the product quality, product access, and consumer welfare outcomes when the firm decides to pursue new consumers in a...

This paper explores possible determinants that may affect an airline's decision to charge passengers different roundtrip fares depending on trip origin, a case of directional price discrimination. Such fare differences cannot be the result of differences in cost, as the cost of flying a...

Problem definition: We study the emerging practice of using opaque selling to dispose of leftover inventory in vertically differentiated markets. With this selling strategy, a firm offers a synthetic product (after the regular selling season) for which consumers do not know the exact identity...

We consider repeated trading by sellers with persistent private information in dynamic lemons markets. We compare the outcomes of a transparent market where past trading prices are public to those of an opaque market, where they are private. We characterize the upper bound of trading surplus in...

We study the problem of modeling purchase of multiple items and utilizing it to display optimized recommendations, which is a central problem for online e-commerce platforms. Rich personalized modeling of users and fast computation of optimal products to display given these models can lead to...

Price discrimination in input markets may be driven by differences in buyers' (i) demands, (ii) costs, or (iii) ‘replacement threats,' in which a buyer obtains favorable pricing by threatening to source an input from a competitor. I analyze the importance of differences in buyers' replacement...