Issue 1

Volume 33 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Spring 2024

The challenges of using ranks to estimate sales

Stan J. Liebowitz, Alejandro Zentner
Researchers have frequently used data on product ranks to estimate nonpublic sales quantities, believing that there is a power-law-induced linear relationship between logged sales ranks and logged sales.

Price promotions as a threat to brands

Roman Inderst, Martin Obradovits
Manufacturers frequently resist heavy discounting of their products by retailers. Since low prices should increase demand and manufacturers could simply refuse to fund deep price promotions, such resistance is puzzling at first sight.

Less is more: A theory of minimalist luxury

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.

Monopoly pricing with dual-capacity constraints

Robert Somogyi
This paper studies the price-setting behavior of a monopoly facing two capacity constraints: one on the number of its consumers, and the other on the amount of products it can sell.

Postsearch uncertainty, product heterogeneity, and price divergence

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.