This paper considers dynamic pricing strategies in a durable good monopoly model with uncertain commitment power to set price paths. The type of the monopolist is private information of the firm and not observable to consumers. If commitment to future prices is not possible, the initial price...

For many goods (such as experience goods or addictive goods), consumers' preferences may change over time. In this paper, we examine a monopolist's optimal pricing schedule when current consumption can affect a consumer's valuation in the future and valuations are unobservable. We assume that...

This paper reviews the small but growing economic literature on network neutrality. It considers a number of possible departures from network neutrality, in particular termination fees, second-degree price discrimination, and vertical foreclosure

When a monopolist has discretion over the timing of infrastructure investments, regulation of post-investment prices interferes with incentivizing socially optimal investment timing. In a model of regulated lumpy investment under uncertainty, we study regulation when the regulator can condition...

Many observers have voiced concerns that standards create essentiality and thus monopoly power for the holders of standard essential patents (SEPs). To address these concerns, Lerner and Tirole (2015) advocate structured price commitments, whereby SEP holders commit to the maximum royalty they...

We study a buyer's optimal investment strategy for new technologies when costs evolve stochastically and are private information to the suppliers. In a continuous time setting, we show how the asymmetric information on the stochastic variables leads to delays in investment compared to the real...

In a model where patients face budget constraints that make some treatments unaffordable, we ask which treatments should be covered by universal basic insurance and which by private voluntary insurance. We argue that both cost effectiveness and prevalence are important if the government wants to...

Critics claim that patent screening is ineffective, granting low-quality patents that impose unnecessary social costs. We develop an integrated framework, involving patent office examination, fees, and endogenous validity challenges in the courts, to study patent screening both theoretically and...

What are the welfare effects of a policy that facilitates for insurance customers to privately and covertly learn about their accident risks? We endogenize the information structure in Stiglitz's classic monopoly insurance model. We first show that his results are robust: For a small information...

We study a monopoly insurance model with endogenous information acquisition. Through a continuous e ort choice, consumers can determine the precision of a privately observed signal that is informative about their accident risk. The equilibrium effort is, depending on parameter values, either...