There is little evidence in support of the main economic rationale for regulating athletic doping: that doping reduces fan interest. The introduction of random testing for performance-enhancing drugs (PED) by Major League Baseball (MLB) offers unique data to investigate the issue. The...

We study the efficiency property of responsive pricing - a scheme first proposed by Vickrey - that increases prices as a function of capacity utilization. We show that although responsive pricing implements allocations that are arbitrarily close to market clearing, these allocations are not...

In a dynamic model of sports competition, we show that when spectators care only about the level of effort exerted by contestants, rewarding schemes that depend linearly on the final score difference provide more efficient incentives for efforts than schemes based only on who wins and loses....

An important lesson from the incentive literature is that explicit incentives may elicit dysfunctional and unintended responses, also known as gaming responses. The existence of these responses, however, is difficult to demonstrate in practice because this behaviour is typically hidden from the...

Quantity surcharges occur when firms market a product in two sizes and offer a promotion on the small size: the large size then costs more per unit than the small one. When quantity surcharges occur the sales of the large size decrease only slightly despite the fact that the small size is a...

Responsive pricing proposes to increase efficiency by introducing a direct linkage between market conditions and changes in prices. This link is established by giving selective discounts that vary in real time as a function of the level of unused capacity. Using data from a unique pricing...

Using data from a large, U.S. federal job training program, we investigate whether enrolment incentives that exogenously vary the ‘shadow prices’ for serving different demographic subgroups of clients influence case workers’ intake decisions. We show that case workers enroll more clients...

Concert tickets can either be sold at a single price or at multiple prices corresponding to different seating categories. We study the relationship between price discrimination and revenue by examining variations in the number of seating categories across concert, tour, artist, location, and...

This Paper studies a monopolist selling tickets to consumers who learn new information about their demands over time. The monopolist can sell early to uninformed consumers and/or close to the event date to informed ones, it can ration tickets and allow ticket holders to resell. I show that...

Pricing schemes that vary prices in response to demand shocks may antagonize consumers and reduce demand. At the same time, consumers may take advantage of the opportunities offered by price changes. Overall, the net impact of varying price on demand is ambiguous. We investigate the issue...