This Paper studies the inter-temporal problem of a monopolistic firm that engages in productivity-enhancing innovations to reduce its labour costs. If the level of wages is sufficiently low, the firm's rate of productivity growth approaches the rate of wage growth and eventually the firm reaches...

This article develops a multi-period production model to examine the optimal dynamic behaviour of a large monopolistic value-maximizing firm that manipulates its valuation as well as the price of its output. In the pre-commitment equilibrium the firm’s output and labour demand are decreased,...

In an intertemporal setting in which individual uncertainty is resolved over time, advance-purchase discounts can serve to price discriminate between consumers with different expected valuations for the same product. Consumers with a high expected valuation purchase the product before learning...

This paper considers a housing insurance market in which buildings have different damage probabilities. Insurers use imperfect tests to find out about buildings’ damage types. The insurance market is a natural monopoly. If more than one insurer is active, high risk house owners continue to...

This Paper studies a model of the distribution of income under bounded needs. Utility derived from any given good reaches a bliss point at a finite consumption level of that good. On the other hand, introducing new varieties always increases utility. It is assumed that each variety is owned by a...

Switching costs and network effects bind customers to vendors if products are incompatible, locking customers or even markets in to early choices. Lock-in hinders customers from changing suppliers in response to (predictable or unpredictable) changes in efficiency, and gives vendors lucrative ex...

For many goods (such as experience goods or addictive goods), consumers' preferences may change over time. In this paper, we examine a monopolist's optimal pricing schedule when current consumption can affect a consumer's valuation in the future and valuations are unobservable. We assume that...

We investigate the robustness of the new foreclosure doctrine and its associated welfare implications to the introduction of incomplete information. In particular, we let the upstream firm’s marginal cost be private information, unknown to the downstream firms. The previous literature has...

The goal of this paper is to reexamine the optimal design and efficiency of loyalty rewards in markets for final consumption goods. While the literature has emphasized the role of loyalty rewards as endogenous switching costs (which distort the efficient allocation of consumers), in this paper I...

We propose to view action-contingent contracts as bets, motivated by different prior beliefs between the contracting parties (rather than, say, as an instrument for overcoming moral hazard problems). Such differences in prior beliefs may arise from inherent biases such as over-optimism. Menus of...