This paper examines two articles that have proposed a definition of the “quality variable” which is still used in the contemporary theory of product differentiation. The first article, written by Lawrence Abbott in 1953, provides a general discussion concerning the role of quality competition on the...
This article examines the impact of trade liberalization on export prices and quality. The article is innovative in two respects. First, unlike previous studies, it considers both input and output tariffs simultaneously in a theoretical model. Second, it empirically tests the effects of a combinatio...
We have used agent-based modeling as our numerical method to artificially simulate a dynamic real economy where agents are rational maximizers of an objective function of Cobb-Douglas type. The economy is characterised by heterogeneous agents, acting out of local or imperfect information, monopolist...
Environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly using strategies to encourage firms to eliminate product components (e.g., palm oil) that are harmful to the environment (e.g., rainforests) or to replace them with NGO‐certified sustainable components. Under what conditions do NGOs...
Environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly using strategies to encourage firms to eliminate product components (e.g., palm oil) that are harmful to the environment (e.g., rainforests) or to replace them with NGO‐certified sustainable components. Under what conditions do NGOs...
This article deals with the effects of firms' quality policies on export performance. We rely on the presence of quality management personnel to assess the level of commitment of firms on issues related to reliability and safety of products, using French administrative employee-firm-level data. We m...
We study a class of location games where players want to attract as many resources as possible and pay a cost when deviating from an exogenous reference location. This class of games includes political competitions between policy-interested parties and firms' costly horizontal differentiation. We fi...
In my dissertation, I will analyze how the product market position of a mobile app affects its pricing strategies, which in turn impacts an app's monetization process. Using natural language processing and k-mean clustering on apps' text descriptions, I created a new variable that measures the disti...
In this paper, we explore a dynamic Bertrand duopoly game with differentiated products, where firms are boundedly rational and consumers are assumed to possess an underlying CES utility function. We mainly focus on two distinct degrees of product substitutability. Several tools based on symbolic com...
What role do journalists and media owners play in slanting media content? In this paper, we open the black box of news production and investigate whether and how journalists themselves decide to bias the news and shield content production from owner influence. To do so, we build a novel dataset on h...
What role do journalists and media owners play in slanting media content? In this paper, we open the black box of news production and investigate whether and how journalists themselves decide to bias the news and shield content production from owner influence. To do so, we build a novel dataset on h...
We endogenize location/product specification choices in a spatial Cournot duopoly on the linear market, when firms' output entails an accidental harm to the environment. Under a strict liability regime, the equilibrium involves no differentiation when the expected harm is low enough. This outcome is...
The paper considers how product liability may shape firm size, product specification choices and market structure. We introduce a spatial Cournot duopoly on the linear market, where firms make an initial decision of product differentiation, then invest in precaution, before competing in quantity. Ou...
This article utilizes a novel empirical strategy, the study of exemplars, to investigate the transformation of quality conventions in the film industry during the 1960s and 1970s. Exemplars are films or directors which are used as a reference point (focal points) in the evaluation of other movies or...
We analyze environmental policy in a model where some consumers (dubbed green) derive warm glow from buying a good of a higher environmental quality, and where green firms differentiate products on their environmental quality to enjoy market power. For any given pollution level, emission taxes turn...
We analyze environmental policy in a model where some consumers (dubbed green) derive warm glow from buying a good of a higher environmental quality, and where green firms differentiate products on their environmental quality to enjoy market power. For any given pollution level, emission taxes turn...
Many differentiated products have key attributes that are unstructured and thus high-dimensional (e.g., design, text). Instead of treating unstructured attributes as unobservables in economic models, quantifying them can be important to answer interesting economic questions. To propose an analytical...
We study price personalization in a two period duopoly with vertically differentiated products. In the second period, a firm not only knows the purchase history of all customers, as in standard Behavior Based Price Discrimination models, but it also collects detailed information on its old customers...
Two firms compete in prices and information disclosure levels. Firms derive revenues from two possible channels, i.e., by selling their service to consumers and by exploiting user data, sold to a monopoly data broker. A consumer signing up to one firm's service decides on the amount of personal info...
We empirically investigate the welfare effects of providing product quality information to consumers in the form of expert opinion scores in a setting of asymmetric information. Identification of the effects of the provision of information comes from a field experiment in the retail wine market. We...