After describing the essential features of the book market, a welfare analysis of the fixed book price agreement is given. Allowance is made for the opportunity cost of reading. Theoretically, the agreement pushes up book prices and depresses book sales. However, more titles will be published,...

We present a policy game where a Rich country has a higher capacity than a Poor country to commit to certain elements of health policy such as providing income related price subsidies and allowing parallel imports (PI). When allowing PI is not a choice for the Poor country, the Rich country...

How should multilateral trade policy be designed in a world in which countries differ in terms of market access and technology, and firms with market power differ in terms of productivity? We answer this question in a model of monopolistic competition in which variable markups increasing in firm...

Asymmetric information is a classic example of market failure that undermines the efficiency associated with perfectly competitive market outcomes: the “lemons” market. Credible certification, that substantiates unobservable characteristics of products that consumers value, is often...

This paper studies the welfare effects of location space constraints when the duopoly sellers are vertically separated. As the downstream firms respond to higher input prices by locating further away from the center of the market, constraining them to locate within the linear city allows the...

This paper studies third degree price discrimination in a monopolistically competitive market. When the number of firms is fixed, price discrimination raises firm profit and reduces consumer welfare relative to uniform pricing. In the long run, the equilibrium product variety under price...

This paper theoretically analyzes the role of reference prices on competition and welfare in a context of a circular city model with free entry and reference prices, in which paying market prices above a reference negatively affects the utility of consumers. Agents interact in a three-stage...

After describing the essential features of the book market, a welfare analysis of the fixed book price agreement is given. Allowance is made for the opportunity cost of reading. Theoretically, the agreement pushes up book prices and depresses book sales. However, more titles will be published,...

Asymmetric information is a classic example of market failure that undermines the efficiency associated with perfectly competitive market outcomes: the "lemons" market. Credible certification, that substantiates unobservable characteristics of products that consumers value, is often considered a...

We develop a stylized two-sided model of the local broadband Internet market where prices are used to facilitate “interactions” between the Broadband Internet Service Provider’s (BISP) subscribers and Content and Application Service Providers (CASPS), as well as the priority (i.e., speed)...