We address the issue of a tradeoff between longand short-term interests in economic management. Starting with an obvious observation that the actions targeted to longand short-term goals are generally in conflict, we pass on to a less obvious satement that it is not an exceptional situation that a smart decision maker can reduce or even eliminate the conflict. We illustrate the statement by an ...

We analyze a supply chain environment in which a distributor facing price-sensitive demand has the opportunity to contractually commit to a delivery quantity at regular intervals over a finite horizon in exchange for a per-unit cost reduction for units acquired via committed delivery. Supplemental orders needed to meet demand are purchased at an additional unit cost. For normally distributed de...

We develop an analytical framework to investigate the competitive implications of personalized pricing (PP), whereby firms charge different prices to different consumers, based on their willingness to pay. We embed personalized pricing in a model of vertical product differentiation, and show how it affects firms’ choices over quality. We show that firms’ optimal pricing strategies with PP may b...

This paper gives a proof of existence of price equilibria under certain parameters for a model of product differentiation commonly used in the empirical geographic differentiation literature. This proof is needed because the assumptions of Caplin and Nalebuff (1991) are not generally satisfied once data is introduced to geographic models. The theorem also has implications for existence in mixed...

This paper applies a model of market power measurement under product differentiation to the case of the gasoline market in California, using data for the period 1983-1989. Our results show that there is a considerable degree of product differentiation among major brands. This allows firms to exercise local market power over their own specific products, but there are also signals of an important...

We evaluate behavior-based price discrimination from an antitrust perspective by focusing on an industry with inherited market dominance. Under horizontal differentiation, behavior-based pricing does not by itself lead to persistence of dominance unless the dominant firm is protected by significantly higher switching costs than its small rival. This result continues to hold even if the dominant...