This paper gives an account of events, and explains some systematic reasons of the UMTS auction flop in Switzerland. Apart from general market developments, which could not have been anticipated, we argue that auctiondesign which was introduced in England and adopted in Switzerland and elsewhere...

Literature in economics and psychology on moral behaviour explores the contexts in which people act in ways that are consistent or inconsistent with their past actions. Such inconsistencies appear to violate economists' assumption of rational consumer behaviour. In this note we show that a...

The main insight of this paper is that moral behavior does not necessarily alleviate coordination problems or may even worsen them, if individuals possess different degrees of morality. We characterize heterogenous Alger-Weibull morality preferences in a canonical model of voluntary...

This paper studies the design of indirect redistributive taxation and of corrective taxation, as well as the formation of equilibrium indirect tax policies via a political process, in the presence of status goods, allowing for the possibility that illegal copies of those goods may be purchased...

The effects of (private, small-scale) piracy on the pricing behavior of producers of information goods are studied within a unified model of vertical differentiation. Although information goods are assumed to be perfectly horizontally differentiated, demands are interdependent because the...

The emergence of online providers aggregating illegal content from streaming platforms is rekindling the debate about online piracy. In the past, the discussion mainly focused on the impact of piracy in content industries and the effect of anti-piracy measures. But little is known about one...

In this paper, we study the effects of a self-regulatory effort, orchestrated by the European Commission, that aims to reduce advertising revenues for publishers of copyright infringing content. Historical data lets us follow how the third-party advertising and tracking services associated with...

Maritime transport has been historically susceptible to piracy. While broad assessments suggest the impact of modern piracy causes large economic losses, the literature lacks quantification of the magnitude of the costs and the behavioral responses that underpin them. Here, we combine theory and...

We develop a model to analyze one mechanism under which stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection may improve the ability of firms in developing countries to break into export markets. A Northern firm with a superior process technology chooses either exports or technology transfer...