Price discrimination emerges as the unique equilibrium outcome in games with either simultaneous choice of policy and price or sequential choice in which firms may commit first to uniform mill pricing before the actual market stage. Our results are used to analyze some common business practices that arise in geographical pricing, like the basing point system, and in the pricing of varieties or options from a base product in a product differentiation context.

We show that space matters in designing the optimal provision of local public goods (LPG's). Geography imposes a particular institutional structure of local governments due to the overlapping of market areas associated with different LPG's. The optimum can be decentralized through local governments that have jurisdiction over market areas of all LPG types. This implies that the appropriate suppliers of LPG's are metropolitan governments which finance them through user charges and land rent. In addition, our approach invalidates the prevailing theory of fiscal federalism, according to which a layer of government should be established for each type of LPG.

The strategic incentives, with respect to the choice of price policy in spatial competition, are analyzed in a duopoly model. Price discrimination emerges as the unique equilibriu m outcome in games with either simultaneous choice of policy and pric e or sequential choice where firms may commit first to uniform mill p ricing before the actual market stage. Nevertheless, profits may be h igher with uniform pricing. The authors' models are applied to analyz e some common business practices that arise in geographical pricing, like the basing point system, and in the pricing of varieties or opti ons from a base product in a product-differentiation context.