We show that returns policies do increase manufacturer profitability by attenuating price competition between retailers. This effect holds only in the presence of end-user demand uncertainty. The conditions under which a returns policy raises the manufacturer's profit are weaker when retailing...

We apply an indirect method to test for the extent of loss leader pricing. Specifically, the extent of loss leader pricing should increase with the profit from other regularly-priced items. Bookstores customarily use bestsellers as loss leaders. Among conventional bookstores, we found that the...

This chapter reviews economic analyses of privacy. We begin by scrutinizing the “free market” critique of privacy regulation. Welfare may be non-monotone in the quantity of information, hence there may be excessive incentive to collect information. This result applies to both non-productive...

Concern over online information privacy is widespread and rising. However, prior research is silent about the value of information privacy in the presence of potential benefits from sharing personally identifiable information. We analyzed individuals' trade-offs between the benefits and costs of...

Parallel imports are a significant academic and policy issue. Official investigations into the impact of parallel imports on music CD prices have reached widely conflicting conclusions. This note reports an event study on an international panel of changes in copyright law to permit or disallow...