We consider a market served by a safe and a risky seller. While the expensive safe seller can solve the problems of all consumers, the cheap risky seller can help a consumer only with a certain probability. The risky seller's success probabilities are distributed across consumers and by the choice of her quality the risky seller determines the shape of this distribution. If the risky seller fails, a consumer ends up with the safe seller, paying for the service twice. We study the price-quality competition between the two providers. We show that the principle of maximum product differentiation does not hold in our model, i.e. the risky seller does not choose the minimum quality level in order to relax price competition
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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number
2041.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets L15 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Information and Product Quality
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