TALKING,SEARCHING, AND PRICING*

I study the implications of interpersonal communication for incentives for consumers to acquire information and firms’ pricing behavior. Firms market a homogeneous product and choose its price; consumers acquire price information at some cost to themselves. Also, each consumer accesses the information acquired by a sample of other consumers—interpersonal communication. An exogenous increase in the level of interpersonal communication decreases the information that consumers acquire, and, when search costs are low, firms price less aggressively. In an extension, consumers may choose to invest in interpersonal communication at some cost. A decrease in the costs of interpersonal communication decreases firms’ competition.     

Informative advertising by heterogeneous firms

This paper introduces a model to analyze the role of the cost of information dissemination in large markets where firms have varying degrees of intrinsic efficiency reflected in their marginal costs. Firms enter a market and discover how efficient they are. Those firms with high enough efficiency stay, others exit. Remaining firms then compete to attract consumers by disseminating information about their existence and their prices using a common advertising technology. The properties of the model’s equilibrium are analyzed. The model is then used to study the effect of the cost of information dissemination on the competitiveness of the market and key industry aggregates, such as price distribution and the distribution of firm value.     

Price competition and innovation in markets with brand loyalty

Intuition suggests that in markets with consumer lock-in (‘brand loyalty’), firms with a large customer base earn higher profits. We show for a homogeneous goods duopoly that the intuition can be misleading, as the intensity of price competition depends on the initial market split. We derive mixed-strategy equilibria, and show that competition is often most intense when the market is split evenly. As a result, firms coordinate on an asymmetric split when consumers are not yet attached to firms. We also allow for asymmetric costs, and analyze when firms with a larger customer base are more eager to innovate.     

Costly Search, Capacity Constraints, and Bertrand Equilibrium Price Dispersion

This article analyzes the impact of transaction (search) costs and capacity constraints in an almost competitive market with homogeneous firms that compete on price. We characterize conditions under which Nash equilibria with price dispersion exist; in equilibrium, firms play pure strategies in prices and consumers adopt a symmetric mixed search strategy. Price dispersion is possible even though consumers all have the same search cost and valuation for the item and prices charged by all firms are common knowledge.     

A laboratory study of advertising and price competition

We use a laboratory experiment to study advertising and pricing behavior in a market where consumers differ in price sensitivity. Equilibrium in this market entails variation in the number of firms advertising and price dispersion in advertised prices. We vary the cost to advertise as well as varying the number of competing firms. Theory predicts that advertising costs act as a facilitating device: higher costs increase firm profits at the expense of consumers. We find that higher advertising costs decrease demand for advertising and raise advertised prices, as predicted. Further, this comes at the expense of consumers. However, advertising strategies are more aggressive than theory predicts with the result that firm profits do not increase.     

Price search and spatial competition

In this paper we study a model where two spatially scattered sellers face a population of consumers dispersed over a given geographical area; they have to incur a transaction cost to place their purchase order. Moreover these consumers have imperfect knowledge of prices, but obtain full information about prices at the first shop they solicit. We study price competition between these firms. The main outcomes of our analysis are as follows. First we show that whenever a price equilibrium exists for given locations of firms, it will necessarily display price dispersion. Second we study location configurations which ensure the existence of a price equilibrium. Furthermore we show that when it exists, a price equilibrium is unique. Finally we analyze firms revenues when merchants anticipate the consequences of their locational choice on subsequent price competition. Then we find that there is an incentive for a firm to get as close as possible to its competitor.     

An experimental study of price dispersion

We report an experiment examining a simple clearinghouse model that generates price dispersion. According to this model, price dispersion arises because of consumer heterogeneity—some consumers are “informed” and simply buy from the firm offering the lowest price, while the remaining consumers are “captive” and shop based on considerations other than price. In our experiment we observe substantial and persistent price dispersion. We find that, as predicted, an increase in the fraction of informed consumers leads to more competitive pricing for all consumers. We also find, as predicted, that when more firms enter the market, prices to informed consumers become more competitive while prices to captive customers become less competitive. Thus, our experiment provides strong support for the model's comparative static predictions about how changes in market structure affect pricing.     

Strategic Pricing, Consumer Search and the Number of Firms

We examine an oligopoly model where some consumers engage in costly non-sequential search to discover prices. There are three distinct price-dispersed equilibria characterized by low, moderate and high search intensity. The effects of an increase in the number of firms on search behaviour, expected prices, price dispersion and welfare are sensitive (i) to the equilibrium consumers' search intensity, and (ii) to the status quo number of firms. For instance, when consumers search with low intensity, an increase in the number of firms reduces search, does not affect expected price, leads to greater price dispersion and reduces welfare. In contrast, when consumers search with high intensity, increased competition results in more search and lower prices when the number of competitors in the market is low to begin with, but in less search and higher prices when the number of competitors is large. Duopoly yields identical expected price and price dispersion but higher welfare than an infinite number of firms.     

企业差异化战略对价格和质量竞争博弈均衡解的影响研究

消费者在购买商品时不仅考虑商品价格而且还要考虑商品质量水平的需求市场,如果存在两寡头企业提供某商品,必然会导致价格和质量的竞争博弈。本文研究表明:为了达到纳什均衡状态,两企业必须采取一定的差异化策略。而且在均衡状态下,如果市场是价格敏感市场,企业的差异化程度越高,对企业和消费者都越有利;如果市场是质量敏感市场,当敏感程度相对很低时,企业的差异化程度越高,对企业和消费者也都越有利;当敏感程度一般时企业可选择适当的差异化程度使得企业和消费者同时达到最大的均衡利润;但当敏感度非常高,企业差异化程度越高对企业的均衡利润越大,可对消费者的均衡利润却越小。     

Firm routines,customer switching and market selection under duopoly

This paper explores the dynamics of market selection for an industry in which firms employ relatively simple pricing, production and investment routines and in which consumers switch between rival firms in response to price differentials but do not all do so instantaneously. The key issue is whether market processes result in the elimination of less efficient firms by their more efficient rivals. That is to say, do such processes unfailingly increase the efficiency with which available economic resources are used? In the context of duopoly, we show that the survival of the more efficient firm is not guaranteed and that, more generally, the outcome depends upon the speeds with which firms adjust prices and capacities and with which customers switch between rival firms.     

Can a decline in search cost increase prices?

This paper provides a new explanation of why a decline in consumers’ price search cost may not lead to lower prices. In a duopoly with price competition, I show that when some consumers are captive to one firm, there may be a non‐monotonic relationship between search cost and market power; firms may charge high prices with higher probability and the average price charged may be higher when consumers’ price search cost falls below a critical level. Furthermore, when firms have asymmetric captive segments, expected prices charged by each firm may move in opposite directions as search cost declines.     

Price Competition and Consumer Externalities in a Vertically Differentiated Duopoly with Information Disparities

In this paper, we extend the model of vertical product differentiation to consider information disparities about quality differences and their effects on price competition. If uninformed consumers overestimate vertical differentiation, asymmetric information is a source of market power and informed consumers exert positive externalities on high quality product purchasers and negative externalities on low quality product purchasers. Such a result is consistent with the fact that information undermines brand. If uninformed consumers are skeptical, adverse selection issues arise and market demands may be perfectly inelastic to prices. With elastic demands equilibrium prices may be either distorted downwards or reflect real quality if the share of informed consumers is suffciently high. Therefore, with skeptical consumers firms may want either to signal quality or subsidize information provision.     

Spatial dispersion in cournot competition

This paper considers the spatial model used by Anderson and Neven (1991) to study firms' decisions on locations without restricting the consumers' reservation price. We note that the pattern of locations varies as the reservation price for a fixed transportation rate decreases. For a high enough reservation price, we find Anderson and Neven (1991)'s result where firms group at the center of the market and serve all consumers. As the reservation price falls, firms start to move away from each other, increasing the quantities shipped to the consumers close to their locations.     

Consumer flexibility,data quality and location choice

We analyze firms’ location choices in a Hotelling model with two-dimensional consumer heterogeneity, along addresses and transport cost parameters (flexibility). Firms can price discriminate based on perfect data on consumer addresses and (possibly) imperfect data on consumer flexibility. We show that firms’ location choices depend on how strongly consumers differ in flexibility. Precisely, when consumers are relatively homogeneous, equilibrium locations are socially optimal regardless of the quality of customer flexibility data. However, when consumers are relatively differentiated, firms make socially optimal location choices only when customer flexibility data becomes perfect. These results are driven by the optimal strategy of a firm on its turf, monopolization or market-sharing, which in turn depends on consumer heterogeneity in flexibility. Our analysis is motivated by the availability of customer data, which allows firms to practice third-degree price discrimination based on both consumer characteristics relevant in spatial competition, addresses and transport cost parameters.     

Location choices and third‐degree spatial price discrimination

This paper studies how firms choose their product differentiation levels when they engage in third‐degree price discrimination in the following product market competition in a location‐price model. We show that firms will not choose to locate at the two endpoints if different consumer groups have similar sizes. Hence, the principle of maximum differentiation does not hold, resulting in a more intense product market price competition. Only if the size of one group of consumers is sufficiently larger than that of the other group, would firms make their products as differentiated as possible by choosing the two endpoints as their locations.     

Bilateral Oligopoly,Private Information,and Pollution Permit Markets

We analyze the effects of strategic behavior and private information in pollution permit markets in which all firms have market power. The market is characterized by supply-function equilibria. Firms submit net supplies for permits and a market maker determines the market-clearing price. Net supplies depend on abatement cost functions, which in turn depend on private information parameters. We calculate the increase in aggregate abatement costs due to strategic behavior and private information and show that private information attenuates the effects of strategic behavior.      

Contracts and asymmetric information in the theory of the firm

This paper extends the Coase notation of firms as intermediaries between consumers and input owners to incorporate asymmetric information. We show that in some cases it is optimal for consumers to pay a fixed price for a product and to ignore how the firm operates and the profit that it makes. If firms have private information that consumers cannot cheaply obtain, however, we demonstrate that the optimal contract may require constraints on firms internal operations and profits. Our work provides conditions under which cost-plus contracts are optimal, and demonstrates when nonprofit firms are the preferred organization structure.     

A conduct parameter model of price discrimination

We consider a conduct parameter model where firms price discriminate based on the consumers’ willingness to pay. For any conduct, the average price is invariant to the extent of price discrimination. Moreover, when the number of prices goes to infinity, there is a linear relationship between market power, measured by conduct, and range of offered prices. Hence, when the firms face competition, some of the high valuation customers are charged below their valuations, which contrasts with perfect price discrimination results for a monopoly.     

Regulation,Local Monopolies and Spatial Competition

Many regulated industries involve an oligopoly market structure. We examine optimal incentive regulation for a duopoly model of spatial competition when firms have private cost information. Market structure is endogenous as regulation determines market segments for firms and output distribution across consumers in each firm's market. By varying the assignment of consumers to firms, a relatively more efficient firm can be rewarded with a larger market, thus reducing quantity incentive distortions. We derive the optimal policy, assess the impact of asymmetric information relative to full information, and examine extensions to allow for ex ante asymmetries in firm structure.     

Price dispersion in the private health insurance industry: The case of Catalonia

This paper presents a vertical and horizontal product differentiation model that explains price dispersion among different kinds of health care insurance firms. Our model shows large insurance firms engaging in price competition with small mutual organizations that serve only a local area and charge lower premiums. We found that, although the market allows the entry of an excessive number of firms, the presence of local insurance companies increases social welfare by increasing the range of products available to consumers. Our conclusions are applicable to OECD countries in general although we rely on Catalonia's data.