Consider a two-product firm that decides on the quality of each product. Product quality is unknown to consumers. If the firm sells both products under the same brand name, consumers adjust their beliefs about quality subject to the performance of both products. We show that if the probability...

Is the reputation of a firm tradeable when the previous owner has to retire even though ownership change is observable? We consider a competitive market in which a share of owners must retire in each period. New owners, observing only recent profits, bid for the firms on sale. Customers are...

Using a unique dataset of art auctions on eBay, we conduct an empirical analysis of the value of a seller's online reputation. Several aspects distinguish our work from most existing research. We analyze a heterogeneous panel data consisting of a large number of observations over a large period...

Many believe that consumer-sourced reputational information about products would increasingly replace top-down regulation. Instead of protecting consumers through coercive laws, reputational information gleaned from the wisdom of the crowd would guide consumer decision making. There is now a...

In this Policy Paper, we analyze the effects of quot;network neutralityquot; proposals that seek to mandate an inflexible set of rules that would foreclose or severely limit many market transactions. Our model reveals that under plausible conditions, rules that prohibit efficient commercial...

Is the reputation of a firm tradeable when the previous owner has to retire even though ownership change is observable? We consider a competitive market in which a share of owners must retire in each period. New owners, observing only recent profits, bid for the firms on sale. Customers are...

Responsive Regulation translated an ongoing academic debate about behavior orientation and regulatory enforcement into a synthetic framework. Yet ethnographic studies reveal that ambiguity pervades regulator–regulatee interactions and suggest that the reality of regulatory encounters may be...

While price-fixing on platforms can attract severe enforcement action, as shown by the Amazon poster case, a more nuanced picture emerges regarding the fixing of prices for sellers by sharing economy platforms. This paper explores possible antitrust responses to such centralised platform-driven...

Scholarship on private legal systems (PLS) explains the evolution of norms created and enforced by PLSs, but rarely addresses the evolution of institutions that form PLSs. Such institutions are assumed to form spontaneously (unless suppressed by law) when law is either unresponsive or incapable...