This paper examines one of the most important marketing strategies by software producers on the Internet. That is whether to offer free samples and if so, whether to list the samples on shareware repositories. I show that firms with higher value products have a greater incentive to offer free...

This paper examines one of the most important marketing strategies by software producers on the Internet. That is whether to offer free samples and if so, whether to list the samples on shareware repositories. I show that firms with higher value products have a greater incentive to offer free...

We analyze optimal trading mechanisms in environments where each trader owns some units of a good to be traded and may be either a seller or a buyer, depending on the realization of privately observed valuations. First, the concept of virtual valuation is extended to ex ante unidentified...

We analyze the role of intermediaries in electronic markets using detailed data of more than 14,000 originated loans on an electronic P2P (peer-to-peer) lending platform. In such an electronic credit market, lenders bid to supply a private loan. Screening of potential borrowers and the...

This paper is concerned with the question of how to deal with Google Shopping’s position on online markets in order to prevent harm to public welfare. From the perspective of sellers and buyers of goods and services in Germany, Google can be seen as a gatekeeper to the Internet and thus as an...

This paper examines, for a two-period signalling game played by a revenue-raising government and a monopolistic firm in an asymmetric information context, how the government behaves when it taxes the firm’s production. Information regarding the firm’s efficiency (or its potential to pay...

Consuming a product does not (necessarily) reveal the environmental damage it may cause. In terms of environmental damage, most goods are credence goods. Therefore, advertising and pricing rarely can transmit such information effectively to consumers. This article considers the scope with which...

We study the principal–agent problem. We show that b-convexity of the space of products, a condition which appears in a recent paper by Figalli, Kim and McCann (2011) [9], is necessary to formulate the problem as a maximization over a convex set. We then show that when the dimension m of the...