If buyers do not observe the quality of a product and production of quality is costly, market allocations can be very inefficient. Certification intermediaries are institutions that provide information about quality to buyers. The amount of information in the market determines the incentives...

In this paper we develop a model of a vertically differentiated industry where the production of higher quality goods needs a higher fraction of specialized labour. In the first stage, firms choose the quality of their products, in the second, both good prices and skilled workers’ wages are...

What is the effect of product market integration on the market equilibrium in the presence of international network externalities in consumption? To address this question, we set up a spatial two-country model and we find that the economic forces at work may have an ambiguous effect on prices.

We analyse firms' incentives to provide two-way compatibility between two network goods with different intrinsic qualities. We study how the relative importance of vertical differentiation with respect to the network effect influences the price competition as well as the compatibility choice....

In a vertically differentiated oligopoly where the high quality variant of the good requires the use of the high quality labour (available in¯fixed supply) ¯firms may either all supply the same quality or di®erentiate their product. Only di®erentiated outcomes can be optimal, but the number...

When the production of high quality goods needs the employment of qualified labour, firms’ decisions concerning quality are affected by the extent to which skills are abundant. By means of a comparison between monopoly and perfect competition, we show how market power in such a context may...

This paper analyses price competition under product differentiation when goods are defined in a two dimensional characteristic space, and consumers do not know which firm sells which quality. Equilibrium prices consist of two additive terms, which balance consumers' relative valuation of goods'...

We analyse the optimal pricing choice of an incumbent firm that sells a good with network externalities and is threatened by the entry of a higher quality variant. In the framework of a vertical differentiation model, we find a necessary and sufficient condition under which quality improvement...

In a successive vertical oligopoly, a set of "sellers" produce some input to be transformed into a final product by a set of "buyers". On this two-sided market, a firm's profit increases with the number of firms of the other type and decreases with the number of firms of its own type. We examine...

After reviewing some of the basic preprocessins techniques for handling safety stocks and multilevel problems, we discusss a variety of aspects arising particularly in small and large bucket (time period) models such as stars-ups, changeovers, minimum batch sizes, choice of one or two set-ups...