Issue 1

Ming Gao
In vertical relations where a retailer enters into agency contracts with multiple heterogenous suppliers of unrelated products, I show the retailer can turn the products into complements or substitutes by charging or subsidizing consumers for access.

In Kyung Kim
In this paper, I study how and why consumers react differently to package downsizing and package price increases that result in the same degree of unit price increases.

Z. Jessie Liu, Pinar Yildirim, Z. John Zhang
We show theoretically that when high-quality, low-price counterfeits exist and are visibly indistinguishable from authentic products, the status-seeking wealthy may embrace a “less is more” purchasing strategy or what we refer to as the minimalist luxury strategy, to signal their status.

Jiajia Cong, Wen Zhou
We study sequential mergers under incomplete information where the follower is ignorant about the leader's merger synergy.

Yijuan Chen, Xiangting Hu, Sanxi Li
We develop a consumer search model in which consumers may remain uncertain about product quality even after inspecting the product. We first consider the postsearch uncertainty regarding vertical quality, and characterize the separating equilibrium in which firms with different quality levels charge different prices.