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-This paper investigates possible changes in Chilean domestic consumer preferences for wine through the estimation of a demand function that allows for structural breaks and regime shifts in the cointegrating relationship. Our findings support both higher own-price elasticity and higher substitutability between wine and beer after 1982, when a shift in regime in the demand function is found. We believe our findings might be due to the introduction of an increasing number of wine varieties in Chile during the last two decades. We argue that more wine varieties affect domestic consumer preferences by altering the product diversity available in the domestic market.Keywords: Preference shifts, wine demand, structural breaks, product diversity. JEL

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Abstract. This paper extends the traditional Hotelling's model of spatial competition by allowing firms to choose the degree of general purposeness of their products before they compete in prices.The degree of general purposeness is approximated by endogenizing the per-unit transportation cost coefficients. The game presents a continuum of perfect Nash equilibria featuring no price competition. In equilibrium, firms behave as 'specialist' by choosing high transportation cost coefficients.This allows them to extract all the marginal consumer's rent and to perfectly segment the market.Moreover, market is entirely served by both firms regardless the value of the consumer's reservation price.

This paper studies the incentives faced by competing auctioneers who can release information to prospective bidders before bidders choose trading partners. I provide sufficient conditions that ensure the existence of a unique equilibrium in which both sellers release all available information. Contrary to previous findings in the literature, the existence of this equilibrium holds true even if there are only two bidders in the market. Thus, the findings of this paper provides support to the idea that competition among sellers improves informational efficiency relatively to monopoly.

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I examine the implications of meet-the-competition clauses (MCCs) for the strategic disclosure of product quality in a duopoly in which sellers can adopt these clauses before setting their prices. I show that MCCs generate incentives for the disclosure of product quality because these clauses facilitate monopoly pricing in states of nature in which the quality of products is the same. This suggests that MCCs may encourage the disclosure of information because sellers can use them to coordinate their pricing decisions based on the information revealed through disclosure.

Abstract. The domestic Chilean wine market is examined through the estimation of an error correction model allowing for structural breaks in the cointegrating vector. Our findings support both parameter instability and one structural break in the long-run relationship in 1982. The wine demand becomes more price-elastic and cross price-elasticity between wine and beer is found to be positive and close to one in the 1983-1998 period. This is in line with the growing substitutability between both wine varieties and wine and beer in Chile during the last two decades. The error correction parameter is found to be negative and highly significant supporting cointegration and suggesting a quick adjustment to long-run equilibrium.JEL Classification: C22, C51, Q11.