Product Lines and Price Discrimination in Markets with Information Frictions
研究了信息摩擦如何颠覆传统经济学中企业通过产品差异化来缓解竞争的原理，发现信息摩擦较小时企业才可能采用非重叠产品线，否则重叠产品线是唯一均衡。
A well-known principle in economics is that firms differentiate their product offerings in order to relax competition. However, in this paper we show that information frictions can invalidate this principle. We build a duopolistic competition model of second-degree price discrimination with information frictions in which (i) an equilibrium always exists with overlapping product qualities, whereas (ii) an equilibrium with nonoverlapping product qualities exists only if both information frictions and the cost of providing high quality are sufficiently small. As a consequence, reasons other than an attempt to soften competition should explain why firms in some cases carry nonoverlapping product lines. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing.