The online infomediary, playing an important role in e-commerce, provides more unbiased and refined product information than usual advertisement provided by online retailers. Interestingly, depending on its capability, the quality of product information is likely to differ. Also, given the fact that it enables consumers to grasp market price dispersion of products, the context of online infomed...

The extensive adoption of uniform pricing for branded variants is a puzzling phenomenon considering that firms may improve profitability through price discrimination. In the paper, we incorporate consumers' concerns of price fairness into a model of price competition and show that uniform price for branded variants may emerge in equilibrium. Interestingly, we find that uniform pricing induced b...

introduction: continuous fluctuations in the prices of agricultural commodities have a significant effect on the situation of countries, especially developing countries in the world. in the short term, the impact of price shocks on imports of agricultural commodities and balance of payments and foreign exchange reserves is considerable in developing countries and it has negative effects on soci...

We study intertemporal price discrimination when consumers can store for future consumption needs. To make the problem tractable we o¤er a simple model of demand dynamics, which we estimate using market level data. Optimal pricing involves temporary price reductions that enable sellers to discriminate between price sensitive consumers, who anticipate purchases for future consumption, and less p...

In many markets, Žrms can price discriminate between their own customers and their rivals’ customers, charging one price to consumers who prefer their own product and another price to consumers who prefer a rival’s product. We Žnd that when demand is symmetric, charging a lower price to a rival’s customers is always optimal. When demand is asymmetric, however, it may be more proŽtable to charge...

This paper introduces price sorting into a consumer search model. Either ascending or descending price sorting can be applied before the sampling process. Consumers search sequentially for products with two types of qualities. We allow a fraction of consumers to have zero search costs, and all other consumers have the same positive search cost. Price dispersion exists in the unique symmetric eq...

Over the past three decades vertical price transmission analysis has been the subject of considerable attention in applied agricultural conomics. It has been argued that the existence of asymmetric price transmission generates rents for marketing and processing agents. Retail prices allegedly move faster upwards than downwards in response to farm level pricemovements. This is an important issue...

authors thank the HEC Foundation for its financial support, and Shantanu Sutta and Gilles Laurent for their comments on a previous draft. 2 Abstract Reference price research suggests that consumers memorize and recall price information when selecting brands for frequently purchased products. In this study, we show that previous price-knowledge surveys provided imperfect estimates of reference p...

During the summer (2000), wholesale electricity prices in California were approximately 500% higher than those during the same months in 1998-1999. The price hike was unexpected by many policy makers and individuals who were involved in the electric utility industry. They have been long wondering whether the electricity deregulation policy (1996) produced benefits of competition promised to con...

This paper models a market in which one firm sells a good with a public base price and a hidden additional fee. Consumers are separated by high and low search costs and have the opportunity to incur their search cost to learn the true value of the add-on price. The firm has a discontinuous profit function that models its trade off between increasing the base price and losing consumers who drop ...