Discussion paper
DP12046 Product Lines and Price Discrimination in Markets with Information Frictions
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 in-formation frictions can invalidate this principle. We build a duopolistic model of second-degree price competition with information frictions in which (i) there always exists an equilibrium with overlapping qualities, whereas (ii) the equilibrium with non-overlapping qualities exists only when both information frictions and the costs of providing high quality are small enough. As a consequence, reasons other than
the attempt to soften competition should be used to explain why firms in some cases carry non-overlapping product lines.
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