No abstract

The large and growing industry of price comparison websites (PCWs) or “web aggregators” is poised to benefit consumers by increasing competitive pricing pressure on firms by acquainting shoppers with more prices. However, these sites also charge firms for sales, which feeds back to raise prices. I find that introducing any number of PCWs to a market increases prices for all consumers, both those who use the sites and those who do not. I then use my framework to identify ways in which a more competitive environment could be achieved.

We study strategic interactions in markets in which firms sell to consumers both directly and via a competitive channel (CC), such as a price comparison website or marketplace, where multiple sellers’ offers are visible at once. We ask how a CC’s size influences market outcomes when some consumers have limited price information. A bigger CC means more consumers compare prices, increasing within-channel competition. However, we show such seemingly pro-competitive developments can raise prices and harm consumers by weakening between-channel competition.

The version presented here is a Working Paper (or 'pre-print') that may be later published elsewhere.

In the classic Hotelling-Downs model of political competition, no pure strategy equilibrium with three or more strategic candidates exists when the distribution of voters' preferred policies is unimodal. I study the effect of introducing two idealist candidates to the model who are non-strategic (i.e., fixed to their policy platforms), while allowing for an unlimited number of strategic candidates. Doing so, I show that equilibrium is restored for a non-degenerate set of unimodal distributions. In addition, the equilibria have the following features: (1) the left-most and right-most candidates (i.e., extremists) are idealists; (2) strategic candidates never share their policy platforms, which instead are spread out across the policy space; and (3) if more than one strategic candidate enters, the distribution of voter preferences must be asymmetric. I also show that equilibria can accommodate idealist fringes of candidates toward the extremes of the political spectrum.