A key concern about counterfeits and weak intellectual property protection is that they may hamper innovation by displacing legitimate sales. This paper combines a natural policy experiment with randomized lab experiments to estimate the heterogeneous impacts of counterfeiting on the sales and...

Worried about unwittingly buying counterfeits, online customers often resort to “the wisdom of crowds” (e.g., product reviews) before purchasing. However, unethical sellers may game the review system through buying fake reviews. In this paper, we use a two-period game theoretical model to...

"Substandard and counterfeit drugs represent a global public health crisis. However, there is little economic analysis of the market given the paucity of data. Focusing on 8 drug types on the WHO-approved medicine list, we constructed an original dataset of 899 drug samples from 17 low- and...

Focusing on 8 drug types on the WHO-approved medicine list, we constructed an original dataset of 899 drug samples from 17 low- and median-income countries and tested them for visual appearance, disintegration, and analyzed their ingredients by chromatography and spectrometry. Fifteen percent of...