Product Characteristics and Price Advertising with Consumer Search

Many advertisements inform the consumer about product characteristics, while others give price information with very little product information, and some provide both types of information. We propose a framework to analyze the incentives for firms to provide various types of information. We consider the case of a single seller. There is no incentive to provide information on product characteristics only, since doing so leads to a holdup problem that the consumers would rationally expect the firm to charge such a high price that no consumer would wish to incur the prior search cost. (A more general argument applies to markets with several firms.) However, price-only and price-and-characteristics advertising can arise depending on the relative strength of product differentiation and consumer search costs. Even when it costs the firm very little to inform consumers the firm may have no incentive to advertise if consumers will sample it anyway. For low search costs the firm has a strict incentive NOT to let consumers know because the firm garners higher profit when consumers have sunk the search cost. Forced disclosure and dissemination of information improves social welfare by eliminating useless search behavior that leads to no purchases (as well as enabling consumers to buy at lower prices). Second, even when the firm must advertise to bring in consumers (i.e., for larger search costs), the firm may prefer to keep consumers in the dark about how much they like the product - this behavior again entails excessive search. Finally, even when the firm finds it optimal to inform consumers of both their match values and the price charged, the level of advertising is too small because the firm only accounts for its private benefit per consumer informed when determining how much to advertise, and not the extra benefit to consumers of making a valuable match.

Effciency and surplus bounds in Cournot competition

We derive bounds on the ratios of deadweight loss and consumer surplus to producer surplus under Cournot competition. To do so, we introduce a parameterization of the degree of curvature of market demand using the parallel concepts of ½-concavity and ½-convexity. The ”more concave” is demand, the larger the share of producer surplus in overall surplus, the smaller is consumer surplus relative to producer surplus, and the lower the ratio of deadweight loss to producer surplus. Deadweight loss over total potential surplus is at …rst increasing with demand concavity, then eventually decreasing. The analysis is extended to asymmetric …rm costs.Cournot equilibrium, social surplus analysis, deadweight loss, market performance.

Pricing, product diversity, and search costs: a Bertrand-Chamberlin-Diamond model

We study price competition in the presence of search costs and product differentiation. The limit cases of the model are the ‘‘Bertrand Paradox,’’ the ‘‘Diamond Paradox,’’ and Chamberlinian monopolistic competition. Market prices rise with search costs and decrease with the number of firms. Prices may initially fall with the degree of product differentiation because more diversity leads to more search and hence more competition. Equilibrium diversity rises with search costs, while the optimum level falls, so entry is excessive. The market failure is most pronounced for low preference for variety and high search costs.

Consumer Information and Firm Pricing: Negative Externalities from Improved Information

We analyze the effect of consumer information on firm pricing in a model where consumers search for prices and matches with products. We consider two types of consumers. Uninformed consumers do not know in advance their match values with firms, whereas informed consumers do. Prices are lower the greater the proportion of uninformed consumers. Hence uninformed consumers exert a positive externality on the others, in contrast to standard results. This leads to socially excessive investment in gathering prior information when aggregate demand is price-sensitive.

Entrepreneurial motives and performance:Why might better educated entrepreneurs be less successful?

In a sample of newly created French firms, the impact of an entrepreneurís education on the firm's survival varies widely depending on his previous labor market situation. While it is strongly positive for the overall population, it is much weaker or insignificant for entrepreneurs who were previously unemployed or poorly matched. Our theoretical entrepreneurship model shows that these differences may be attributed to differences in unobserved human capital for better educated entrepreneurs across different initial states in the labor market. Empirical results are consistent with the theory if employers have limited information about potential entrepreneurs'human capital

Push-me pull-you: comparative advertising in the OTC analgesics industry

We derive equilibrium incentives to use comparative advertising that pushes up own brand perception and pulls down the brand image of targeted rivals. Data on content and spending for all TV advertisements in OTC analgesics 2001-2005 enable us to construct matrices of dollar rival targeting and estimate the structural model. Using brands' optimal choices, these attack matrices identify diversion ratios, from which we derive comparative advertising damage measures. We find that outgoing comparative advertising attacks are half as powerful as self-promotion in raising own perceived quality and cause more damage to the targeted rival than benefit to the advertiser. Comparative advertising causes most damage through the pull-down effect and has substantial benefits to other rivals

Non-Standard Errors

In statistics, samples are drawn from a population in a data-generating process (DGP). Standard errors measure the uncertainty in estimates of population parameters. In science, evidence is generated to test hypotheses in an evidence-generating process (EGP). We claim that EGP variation across researchers adds uncertainty: Non-standard errors (NSEs). We study NSEs by letting 164 teams test the same hypotheses on the same data. NSEs turn out to be sizable, but smaller for better reproducible or higher rated research. Adding peer-review stages reduces NSEs. We further find that this type of uncertainty is underestimated by participants

Non-standard errors

In statistics, samples are drawn from a population in a data-generating process (DGP). Standard errors measure the uncertainty in estimates of population parameters. In science, evidence is generated to test hypotheses in an evidence generating process (EGP). We claim that EGP variation across researchers adds uncertainty: Non-standard errors (NSEs). We study NSEs by letting 164 teams test the same hypotheses on the same data. NSEs turn out to be sizable, but smaller for better reproducible or higher rated research. Adding peer-review stages reduces NSEs. We further find that this type of uncertainty is underestimated by participants