The paper deals with the competitive effects of price guarantees in a spatial duopoly where consumers can search for lower prices but have to incur hassle costs if they want to claim a price guarantee. It is shown that symmetric equilibria with and without price guarantees exist but price guarantees will have no effect on prices if search costs are low, hassle costs are high and the number of u...

This thesis focuses on households’ response to public health crisis like SARS. A model is proposed to describe households’ efforts to reduce the probability of being affected and severity if being affected. The model is expanded considering households’ learning process towards the crisis. It is concluded that the government can stabilize the sharp increase in market demands by information release.

Many industries including music and e-book industries have been making or already made the transition from physical to digital goods in a couple of decades. Since the transformation fundamentally affects the cost structure, consumers’ purchasing behavior, and other critical factors in the industries, it is important to understand the changes that the transition has brought about. This paper emp...

factors influencing price fairness and its impact on consumer behavior is one of the most important topics in pricing which can have significant impact on consumers in their attitude toward the organization. in this paper, the impact of price fairness on loyalty, willingness to pay and complain and revenge intention of customers in internet access services industry has been tested. the data hav...

We separate the budgetary and non-budgetary effects of price on demand using choice data from wine tasting experiments in which consumers tasted wines of different quality accompanied by fictitious price information. The non-budgetary effect is present and nonlinear: it is strongly positive between e 3 and e 5, and undetectable between e 5 and e 8. We find a similar nonlinear price-quality rela...

introduction: market power is an important factor affecting welfare. existence of market power on the purchase side reduces supplier welfare. however, existence of market power on the sales side reduces supplier welfare. some believe that the agricultural market structure is a monopoly. in fact, most of the agricultural products can be purchased by small firms and then delivered to consumers be...

We examine the effect of reference prices on consumer bidding behavior in interactive pricing mechanisms used in online retailing, e.g., auctions and name-your-own-price. We find significant influences of different reference price concepts on bid values. However, after controlling for internal and external reference prices, sellers only have a moderate ability to affect bid values via the provi...

Unlike frequent price promotions, a publicly announced permanent price cut is more likely to cause consumers to strategically shift their decision rules to adapt to the new pricing regime. Research is needed to (1) study whether permanent price cuts cause consumer preference to shift over time; (2) examine how the price cuts affect consumer choices in the short and long run; (3) examine the dif...

Our research empirically analyzes consumer behavior at Internet shopbots— sites that allow consumers to make “one-click” price comparisons for product offerings from multiple retailers. By allowing researchers to observe exactly what information the consumer is shown and their search behavior in response to this information, shopbot data has unique strengths for analyzing consumer behavior. Fur...

The recent low CO2 prices in the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) have triggered a discussion whether the EU ETS needs to be adjusted. We study the effects of CO2 price floors and a price ceiling on the dynamic investment pathway of two interlinked electricity markets (loosely based on Great Britain, which already has introduced a price floor, and on Central Western Europe). Usin...