We examine the ability of policymakers to stimulate household borrowing and spending during the Great Recession by reducing banks' cost of funds. Using panel data on 8.5 million U.S. credit card accounts and 743 credit limit regression discontinuities, we estimate the marginal propensity to...

In this study, we investigate behavioral constraints on pricing by using a novel laboratory experiment in which actual consumption goods are traded. We test different models and provide several insights into pricing and reactions to price discrimination. First, we identify the extent to which...

Museums have many different goals beyond efficiency such as social equity, financial revenue, attracting donors and gaining international, regional or local prestige. Various pricing schemes are being discussed with the aim of reaching these goals. The classical ones are entry prices and free...

We examine whether concerns about lenders' discrimination based on community racial characteristics can be empirically substantiated in the context of neighborhoods on and near American Indian reservations. Drawing on a large-scale dataset consisting of individual-level credit bureau records and...

Pay What You Want (PWYW) can be an attractive marketing strategy to price discriminate between fair-minded and selfish customers, to fully penetrate a market without giving away the product for free, and to undercut competitors that use posted prices. We report on laboratory experiments that...

This paper analyzes persuasive advertising and pricing in oligopoly if firms sell differentiated products and consumers have heterogeneous social attitudes towards the consumption by others. Deriving product demand from primitives, we show that the demand-enhancing effect of persuasive...

Studying very detailed micro data collected around two different VAT reforms in Europe, we show that tax incidence is heavily dependent on the characteristics of the price-setting firms. The reforms generated bimodal price-change distributions; nearly all independent restaurants left prices...

We consider a network that intermediates traffic between free content providers and consumers. While consumers do not know the traffic cost when deciding on consumption, a content provider knows his cost but may not control the consumption. We study how pricing consumers' and content providers'...

The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board administers the purchase and sale of wine and spirits and is mandated to charge a uniform 30% markup on all products. We use an estimated discrete choice model of demand for spirits, together with information on wholesale prices, to assess the implications...

The SSM is a proposal from the G-33 Group in the Doha Round negotiations in which developing countries would be allowed to use contingent tariffs to control import surges of food commodities and/or downward spikes in their border prices. The principal objective is to safeguard the livelihood...