I show that an advertising ban is more likely to increase -- rather than decrease -- total consumption when advertising does not bring about a large expansion of market demand at given prices and when it increases product differentiation (thus allowing firms to command higher prices). In this...

The traditional theory of monopolistic screening tackles individual self-selection but does not address the possibility that buyers could form a coalition to coordinate their purchases and to reallocate the goods. In this paper, we design the optimal sale mechanism which takes into account both...

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...

We present a model of price discrimination where a monopolist faces a consumer who is privately informed about the distribution of his valuation for an indivisible unit of good but has yet to learn privately the actual valuation. The monopolist sequentially screens the consumer with a menu of...

This paper argues that the strategic use of debt favours the revelation of information in dynamic adverse selection problems. Our argument is based on the idea that debt is a credible commitment to end long term relationships. Consequently, debt encourages a privately informed party to disclose...

The organizational design of research and development conditions the incentives of the researchers of the research project. In particular, the organizational form determines the allocation of effort of the researcher between time spent on research and time spent lobbying m anagement. Researchers...

When to allow Research Joint Ventures (RJVs) or not is an important instrument in the development of an optimal R&D policy. The regulator, however, is unlikely to know all the relevant information to regulate R&D optimally. The extent to which there exist appropriability problems between the...

Many models in the economics literature deal with strategic situations with privately informed agents. In those models the information structure is assumed to be exogenous and common knowledge. We consider whether such models, and the results they produce, are robust with respect the...

We study a situation in which an auctioneer wishes to sell an object to one of N risk-neutral bidders with heterogeneous preferences. The auctioneer does not know bidders’ preferences but has private information about the characteristics of the ob ject, and must decide how much information to...

How much information does an auctioneer want bidders to have in a private value environment? We address this question using a novel approach to ordering information structures based on the property that in private value settings more information leads to a more disperse distribution of buyers’...