Urban economists generally understand cities to balance negative externalities of congestion against the positive effects of agglomeration on productivity and consumers (Henderson, 1969). It is commonly assumed that that agglomeration promotes product variety. Here we explore a related but distinct effect on consumers, the effect of agglomeration (or city size) on product quality. This question...

Do larger markets offer better products? The question has implications both for theories of cities and for theories of market organization. We document that in the restaurant industry, where quality is produced largely with variable costs, the range of qualities on offer increases in market size, with each product maintaining a small market share. In daily newspapers, where quality is produced ...

This paper presents a model in which some consumers shop on the basis of price alone, without attention to product quality. A firm may “cheat” (i.e., cut quality) to exploit these inattentive consumers. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, firms follow a mixed strategy involving both price and quality dispersion. Firms are less likely to cheat when there are fewer inattentive consumers, which i...

In the past few years, there has been an increasing interest in mining opinions from product reviews [3][4][5]. However, due to the lack of editorial and quality control, reviews on products vary greatly in quality. Thus, it is crucial to have a mechanism capable of assessing the quality of reviews and detecting low-quality and noisy reviews. Some shopping sites already provide a function of as...

I investigate the behaviour of a multiproduct monopolist supplying vertically di®erentiated varieties of the same good. The discrete model adopted here allows to obtain a continuous model when, in the limit, the number of varieties becomes in ̄nitely large. The main ̄nding establishes that the tendency on the part of the monopolist to undersupply all qualities but the top one can take two alterna...

This paper examines the impact of architectural decisions on the level of defects in a product. We view products as collections of components linked together to work as an integrated whole. Previous work has established modularity (how decoupled a component is from other product components) as a critical determinant of defects, and we confirm its importance. Yet our study also provides empirica...

a r t i c l e i n f o In markets where product quality is important, more than one characteristic is usually necessary for producers to define product quality. Standard theory maintains that: (i) in a duopoly there will be a quality leader no matter whether the product can incorporate one or two vertical attributes; (ii) differentiation pertains only to one attribute. By contrast, in our setup ...