Who Loses when Prices are Negotiated? An Analysis of the New Car Market

We establish that there are large and persistent differences in final transaction prices for identical new cars, and that demographic characteristics explain at least 20% of the observed variation. Older consumers perform progressively worse in negotiations, and the age premium is greater for women than for men. Our results suggest that the complex nature of vehicle transactions leads to price dispersion in this market, and that the worst performing groups—older women—have the lowest rates of market participation. We conjecture that the results are driven by the sharp increases in women's education and labor force participation in recent decades.     

Consumer search and dynamic price dispersion: an application to gasoline markets

This article studies the role of imperfect information in explaining price dispersion. We use a new panel data set on the U.S. retail gasoline industry and propose a new test of temporal price dispersion to establish the importance of consumer search. We show that price rankings vary significantly over time; however, they are more stable among stations at the same street intersection. We establish the equilibrium relationships between price dispersion and key variables from consumer search models. Price dispersion increases with the number of firms in the market, decreases with the production cost, and increases with search costs.     

Mergers in Two-Sided Markets: An Application to the Canadian Newspaper Industry

In this paper, we study mergers in two-sided industries and, in particular, the effects of mergers in the newspaper industry. We present a model which shows that mergers in two-sided markets may not necessarily lead to higher prices for either side of the market. We test our conclusions by examining a spate of mergers in the Canadian newspaper industry in the late 1990s. Specifically, we analyze prices for both circulation and advertising to try to understand the impact that these mergers had on consumer welfare. We find that greater concentration did not lead to higher prices for either newspaper subscribers or advertisers.