There is much debate on how the flow of information between firms should be organized, and whether existing privacy laws should be amended.We offer a welfare comparison of the three main current policies towards consumer privacy - anonymity, opt in, and opt out - within a two-period model of...

A recent string of theoretical papers highlights the importance of geographical distance in explaining pricing and availability of loans to small firms.Lenders located in the vicinity of small firms have significantly lower monitoring and transaction costs, and hence considerable market power if...

This paper studies the welfare implications of using market mechanisms to allocate transmission capacity in recently liberalized electricity markets. It questions whether access to this essential facility should be traded on a market, or whether the incumbent should retain exclusive usage...

Competition authorities and regulatory agencies sometimes impose pricing restrictions on firms with substantial market power — the “dominant” firms. We analyze the welfare effects of a ban on behaviour-based price discrimination in a two-period setting where the market displays a...

We propose a heteroscedastic regression model to identify the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted to small and medium sized enterprises. We interpret unexplained deviations as evidence of the banks’ discretionary use of market power in the loan rate setting...

Abstract: We study the competitive and welfare consequences when only one firm must commit to uniform pricing while the competitor’s pricing policy is left unconstrained. The asymmetric no-discrimination constraint prohibits both behaviour-based price discrimination within the competitive...

We propose a model to reconcile the theory of inter-temporal non-renewable resource depletion with well-known stylized facts concerning the exploitation of exhaustible resources such as oil. Our approach introduces geological constraints into a Hotelling type extraction-exploration model. We...

This paper introduces a method for computing the maximum volume inscribed ellipsoid and k-ball of a projected polytope. It is known that deriving an explicit description of a projected polytope is NP-hard. By using adjustable robust optimization techniques, we construct a computationally...