Heiko Karle

Competition under consumer loss aversion

We address the effect of contextual consumer loss aversion on firm strategy in imperfect competition. Consumers are fully informed about match value and price at the moment of purchase. However, some consumers are initially uninformed about their tastes and form a reference point consisting of an expected match—value and price distribution, while others are perfectly informed all the time. We show that, in duopoly, a larger share of informed consumers leads to a less competitive outcome if the asymmetry between firms is sufficiently large and that narrowing the set of products which consumers consider leads to a more competitive outcome.

Creating Attachment through Advertising: Loss Aversion and Pre–Purchase Information

Complementing the existing literature on anchoring effects and loss aversion, we analyze how firms can influence loss–averse consumers’ willingness to pay by product information in the form of informative advertising rather than by prices. We find that consumers’ willingness to pay is greatest when only partial information about the product—i.e. only a fraction of product attributes—is disclosed, and that partial information disclosure is the optimal mode of advertising for a monopolistic firm. This causes the consumers’ realized product valuation to diverge from their intrinsic product valuation, which leads to a reduction of consumer surplus. Consequently, transparency policies can help to protect consumers.

Ownership and control in a competitive industry

We study a differentiated product market in which an investor initially owns a controlling stake in one of two competing firms and may acquire a non-controlling or a controlling stake in a competitor, either directly using her own assets, or indirectly via the controlled firm. While industry profits are maximized within a symmetric two product monopoly, the investor attains this only in exceptional cases. Instead, she sometimes acquires a noncontrolling stake. Or she invests asymmetrically rather than pursuing a full takeover if she acquires a controlling one. Generally, she invests indirectly if she only wants to affect the product market outcome, and directly if acquiring shares is profitable per se.

The Structure of Negotiations: Incomplete Agreements and the Focusing Effect

Two negotiating parties with preferences distorted by the focusing effect (Koszegi and Szeidl, 2013) may implement an agreement that is inefficient. In particular, an issue will be inefficiently left out of the agreement or inefficiently included in the agreement whenever the importance of the other issues on the table is sufficiently large. In extreme cases, this could lead to an inefficient breakdown of the negotiation. Anticipating this possibility, the negotiating parties may negotiate in stages, by first signing an incomplete agreement and later finalizing the outcome of the negotiation. As in Raiffa (1982), these incomplete agreements may impose bounds on some dimensions of the bargaining solution in order to reduce their salience.