Prices as signals of product quality in a duopoly
Minghua Chen  1@  , Konstantinos Serfes  2@  , Eleftherios Zacharias  3@  
1 : Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Research Institute of Economics and Management
Chengdu, Sichuan -  China
2 : Drexel University, School of Economics, Bennett S. LeBow College of Business
Philadelphia PA 19104 -  United States
3 : Athens University of Economics and Business  (AUEB)  -  Website
Patision 76, 10434, Athens -  Greece

In a duopoly model of horizontal and vertical differentiation, where consumers are ex-ante unaware of product qualities, we study the firms' incentives to signal quality via prices. Consumers, after they observe prices, can evaluate a firm's product quality before purchase if they incur a search cost. We show that a complete information (undistorted) separating equilibrium and a unique pooling equilibrium (in pure strategies) exist. A lower search cost moves the market equilibrium from pooling to separating and induces a mean-preserving spread in the distribution of the equilibrium prices.


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