Starting with Krugman (1980), much literature has analyzed how trade liberalization affects the economy based on the notion that trade is motivated by consumer's love of variety. In this paper, I augment these preferences by the determinants of demand for heterogeneous products. The model...

This paper starts by showing that in the European car industry, there exist cross-country taste differences along the product attribute dimension that significantly drive net trade patterns and reduce the volume of trade. Further it is shown that, after the creation of the European common...

This paper studies optimal nonlinear pricing for a monopolist when consumers' preferences exhibit temptation and self-control as in Gul and Pesendorfer (2001a). Consumers are subject to temptation inside the store but exercise self-control, and those foreseeing large self-control costs do not...

This paper studies price competition between experts and discounters in a market for credence goods. While experts can identify a consumer’s problem by exerting costly but unobservable diagnosis effort, discounters just sell treatments without giving any advice. The unobservability of...

This article studies the use of different distribution channels as an instrument of price discrimination in credence goods markets. In credence goods markets, where consumers do not know which quality of the good or service they need, price discrimination proceeds along the dimension of quality...

We investigate the impact of self-organized reputation versus certification by an independent institution on demand for online shops. Using data from a large Austrian price comparison site, we show that quality seals issued by a credible and independent institution increase demand more than...

In many markets, homogenous goods and services are sold both by large global frms and small local frms. Surprisingly, the large frms charge, often substantially, higher prices. Examples include hotels, airlines, and coffee shops. This paper provides a parsimonious model that can account for...

This paper provides a theoretical rationale for non-binding retail price recommendations (RPRs) in vertical supply relations. Analyzing a bilateral manufacturer-retailer relationship with repeated trade, we show that linear relational contracts can implement the surplusmaximizing outcome. If the...

This paper analyzes the role of product quality and labor efficiency in shaping the trade patterns and trade intensities within and across two groups of countries, the developed and richer North and the developing South. Taking prices as a proxy for quality, recent empirical literature...

There are two competing sellers of an experience good, one offers high quality, one low. The low-quality seller can engage in deceptive advertising, potentially fooling a buyer into thinking the product is better than it is. Although deceptive advertising might seem to harm the buyer, we show...