Holdout problems prevent private (voluntary and self-financing) assembly of complementary goods--such as land or dispersed spectrum--from many self-interested sellers. While mechanisms that fully respect sellers' property rights cannot alleviate these holdout problems, traditional solutions,...

Calls for benefit-cost analysis in rule-making, based on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, have revealed a paucity of work on allocative efficiency in financial markets. We propose three principles to help fill this gap. First, we highlight the need for quantifying the statistical cost of a...

I develop a general theory of monopoly pricing of networks. Platforms use insulating tariffs to avoid coordination failure, implementing any desired allocation. Profit maximization distorts in the spirit of A. Michael Spence (1975) by internalizing only network externalities to marginal users....