This paper shows in a vertical product differentiation model with variable costs of quality that monopolistic third-degree price discrimination always reduces welfare regardless of whether the quality is fixed or is endogenous. The results provide rich implications for antitrust policy.

We consider the optimal market segmentation problem of a monopolist that faces a continuum of customers when it is costly to prevent resale (or parallel trade) among groups. In our framework, the monopolist chooses the number k≥1 of market segments, but also their design and the discriminatory...

Roy (Safety First and the Holding of Assets, 1952) argues that decisions under uncertainty motivate firms to avoid bankruptcy. In this paper, the authors ask about the behaviour of a monopolist who pre-commits to price when she has only probabilistic knowledge about demand. They argue that...

This article analyzes how a property tax affects a lease-sale strategy of a durable-goods monopolist, and discusses its implications on social welfare. This paper presents some interesting results: (i) Contrary to the traditional view, social welfare can be enhanced by a tax when the time...

Existing models of R&D are not easily reconciled with four observable aspects of R&D: initial technologies (ideas) need to be developed further, only a minority of initial ideas are successfully brought to the market, production and process innovations take place simultaneously (whereby,...

In this note, we propose a model where a quantity setting monopolist has incomplete knowledge of the demand function. In each period, the firm sets the quantity produced observing only the selling price and the slope of the demand curve at that quantity. Given this information and through a...

This paper considers price determination by monopolistic sellers who know the distribution of valuations among the potential buyers. We derive a novel condition under which the optimal price set by the monopolist is unique. In many settings, this condition is easy to interpret, and it is valid...