This page is the result of an initiative to organize a reading group around important texts for the economics of product quality. Five texts per theme are suggested.
Product Quality and Information
Akerlof, George Arthur. 1970. The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3): 488-500.
Nelson, Phillip. 1970. Information and Consumer Behavior. Journal of Political Economy, 78(2): 311-329.
Darby, Michael and Edi Karni. 1973. Free Competition and the Optimal Amount of Fraud. The Journal of Law & Economics ,16(1): 67-88.
Mussa, Michael and Sherwin Rosen. 1978. Monopoly and Product Quality. Journal of Economic Theory, 18(2): 301-317.
Stiglitz, Joseph Eugene. 1987. The Causes and Consequences of the Dependence of Quality on Price. Journal of Economic Literature, 25(1): 1-48.
Trade and Product Quality
Flam, Harry and Elhanan Helpman. 1987. Vertical Product Differentiation and North-South Trade. The American Economic Review, 77(5), 810-822.
Murphy, Kevin and Andrei Shleifer. 1997. Quality and Trade. Journal of Development Economics, 53(1): 1-15.
Hummels, David and Peter Klenow. 2005. The Variety and Quality of a Nation's Exports. The American Economic Review, 95(3): 704-723.
Abdul Azhar and Robert Elliott. 2006. On the Measurement of Product Quality in Intra-Industry Trade. Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, 142(3): 476-495.
Juan Carlos Hallak and Peter Schott. 2011. Estimating Cross-Country Differences in Product Quality. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(1): 417-474.
The Characteristics Approach
Hotelling, Harold. 1929. Stability in Competition. The Economic Journal, 39(153): 41-57.
Stigler, George Joseph. 1945. The Cost of Subsistence. Journal of Farm Economics, 27(2): 303-314.
Lancaster, Kelvin John. 1966. A New Approach to Consumer Theory. Journal of Political Economy, 74(2): 132-157.
Gorman, William Moore and Gareth Myles. 1987. Characteristics. In John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (Eds.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Volume 1. (p. 403-406). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kuenne, Robert. 1998. Price and Nonprice Rivalry in Oligopoly. London: MacMillan. Chapter 2.
Measurement and Standards
Waugh, Frederick Vail. 1928. Quality Factors Influencing Vegetable Prices. Journal of Farm Economics, 10(2): 185-196.
Shewhart, Walter Andrew. 1933. The Rôle of Statistical Method in Economic Standardization. Econometrica, 1(1): 23-35.
Debreu, Gérard. 1959. Theory of Value. Chapter 2.
Leffler, Keith. 1982. Ambiguous Changes in Product Quality. The American Economic Review, 72(5): 956-967.
Barzel, Yoram. 1982. Measurement Cost and the Organization of Markets. The Journal of Law & Economics, 25(1): 27-48.
Modelling Product Quality
Abbott, Lawrence. 1953. Vertical Equilibrium under Pure Quality Competition. The American Economic Review, 43(5): 826-845.
Dorfman, Robert and Peter Otto Steiner. 1954. Optimal Advertising and Optimal Quality. The American Economic Review, 44(5): 826-836.
Archibald, George Christopher. 1961. Chamberlin versus Chicago. The Review of Economic Studies, 29(1): 2-28.
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. 1965. Measure, Quality, and Optimum Scale. Sankhya: The Indian Journal of Statistics, 27(1): 39-64.
Sweeney, James. 1974. Quality, Commodity Hierarchies, and Housing Markets. Econometrica, 42(1): 147-167.
Product Differentiation
Chamberlin, Edward Hastings. 1953. The Product as an Economic Variable. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 67(1): 1-29.
Shaked, Avner and John Sutton. 1982. Relaxing Price Competition through Product Differentiation. The Review of Economic Studies, 49(1): 3-13.
Caves, Richard and Peter Williamson. 1985. What is Product Differentiation, Really? The Journal of Industrial Economics, 34(2): 113-132.
Eaton, Curtis and Richard George Lipsey. 1989. Product Differentiation. In Richard Schmalensee and Robert Willig (Eds.), Handbook of Industrial Organization. Volume 1 (p. 723-768). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Anderson, Simon. 2018. Product Differentiation. In Steven Neil Durlauf and Lawrence Blume (Eds.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Third Edition (p. 10806-10812). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Product Quality and Price Indexes
Fisher, Franklin and Karl Shell. 1971. Taste and Quality Change in the Pure Theory of the True Cost-of-Living Index. In Zvi Griliches (Ed.), Price Indexes and Quality Change. Studies in New Methods of Measurement (p. 16-54). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rosen, Sherwin. 1974. Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Product Differentiation in Pure Competition. Journal of Political Economy, 82(1): 34-55.
Moulton, Brent and Karin Moses. 1997. Addressing the Quality Change Issue in the Consumer Price Index. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1997(1): 305-366.
Banzhaf, Spencer. 2001. Quantifying the Qualitative: Quality-Adjusted Price Indexes in the United States, 1915-61. History of Political Economy, 33(1): 345-370.
Stapleford, Thomas. 2011. Reconceiving Quality: Political Economy and the Rise of Hedonic Price Indexes. History of Political Economy, 43(1): 309-328.