A common feature of low-price guarantees is that they allow consumers to postpone bargain-hunting until after the purchase. This paper addresses a number of questions concerning the adoption pattern of price-matching and price-beating guarantees with post-purchase search and their impacts on market prices. It is shown that low-price guarantees are offered by low-cost firms, and are associated w...

We model cheating in second price auctions when valuations of bidders are affiliated. Bidders predict cheating behavior by an unfair seller who can observe the bids submitted by all bidders and then submits his extra bid to increase the payment of the winning bidder. We derive a symmetric equilibrium strategy in the cheating model. Moreover, we conduct a numerical analysis to compare a second p...

Our submission guesses at entailment based on word similarity between the hypotheses and the text. We attempt three kinds of comparisions: original words (with normalized dates and numbers) synonyms, and antonyms. Each of the three comparisions contributes a different weight to the entailment decision. Our results are insignificantly better than chance for the two-way comparison. However, for t...

This article analyses the pricing policy equilibria emerging in a duopoly when one firmmay choose whether to engage in behaviour-based price discrimination or uniform pricing while the rival price discriminates. The question we address is: should a firm price discriminate when facing a price discriminating rival? Our main conclusion is that, if the consumers are sufficiently myopic, it is bette...

We consider a financial market model with a large number of interacting agents. Investors are heterogeneous in their expectations about the future evolution of an asset price process. Their current expectation is based on the previous states of their “neighbors” and on a random signal about the “mood of the market.” We analyze the asymptotics of both aggregate behavior and asset prices. We give...

This paper compares the cognitive-behavioral and psychoanalytical approaches with respect to the way in which each of them conceives of representation and deals with the issues that this involves. In both of them conscious and latent (unconscious) representations play a crucial role. Highlighting similarities and differences facilitate communication on a theoretical level but also prove helpful...

Low search costs in Internet markets can be used by consumers to find low prices, but can also be used by retailers to monitor competitors’ prices. This price monitoring can lead to price matching, resulting in dampened price competition and higher prices in some cases. This paper analyzes price data for 316 bestselling, computer, and random book titles gathered from 32 retailers between August...

When identical firms pay a fee to list prices at a price comparison site and can price discriminate between consumers who do and don’t use the site, prices listed at the site are dispersed but lower than at firms’ own websites. (JEL Numbers: D4, D8, M3, L13.

This paper is one in a set of related papers recently put forward by Gert Peersman, in conjunction with the co-authors of this paper, Christiane Baumeister and Ine Van Robays. This body of work commendably attempts to more thoroughly explore the empirical linkages between oil price fluctuations and real economic outcomes for a variety of countries, in the hope of drawing together some general r...