This article is centred on the volatility of commodity prices. It presents the instruments offering a protection against volatility and shows how they can be employed. The first section exposes these derivative instruments. It distinguishes them in step with the need they respond and the way...

Can investors with irrational beliefs be neglected as long as they are rational on average ? Does unbiased disagreement lead to trades that cancel out with no consequences on prices, as implicitly assumed by the traditional models ? We show in this paper that there is an important impact of...

A firm chooses a price and the product information it discloses to a consumer whose tastes are privately known. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition on the match function for full disclosure to be the unique equilibrium outcome whatever the costs and prior beliefs about product and...

We extend the persuasion game to bring it squarely into the economics of advertising. We model advertising as exciting consumer interest into learning more about the product, and determine a firm's equilibrium choice of advertising content over quality information, price information, and...

Improved consumer information about horizontal aspects of products of similar quality leads to better consumer matching but also to higher prices, so consumer surplus can go up or down, while profits rise. With enough quality asymmetry, though, the higher-quality (and hence larger) firm's price...

This note analyzes some properties of optional two-part pricing in a two-type economy. First, the optimal contracts along the Paretian frontier are described. Then, the duality relation between the Rawlsian program and the discriminating monopoly is demonstrated. Last, this property is used to...

We study competition in two sided markets with common network externality rather than with the standard inter-group effects. This type of externality occurs when both groups benefit, possibly with different intensities, from an increase in the size of one group and from a decrease in the size of...