Group Consumption and Product Diversity: The Case of Smoking Bans
研究了存在搜索成本和消费者群体时产品多样性的形成机制，发现少数群体的偏好可能主导多数企业的产品选择，并以酒吧餐馆禁烟令为例说明。
Abstract I study product diversity in the presence of search costs and groups of consumers. Groups with heterogeneous tastes create a leverage effect on competition: a large majority of firms may end up offering a product that corresponds to the taste of the minority. I illustrate this idea with smoking bans in bars and restaurants. When the first nonsmoking restaurants opened, there were few of them with little competition and high market power on nonsmokers. By extracting a large surplus from nonsmokers, nonsmoking restaurants became unattractive to other groups, while smoking restaurants were plenty and competitive, attracting both smokers and mixed groups.