While second-degree price discrimination is standard in commercial practice in many industries, consumer advocates and public interest groups have reacted with skepticism against tendencies to move away from flat rates and introduce greater tariff diversity. This paper provides an empirical...

The number of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements has surged in recent years. In order to benefit from preferential tariff rates,firms must apply and comply with rules of origin requirements. This is costly and explains why preference utilization rates (PUR) are far below 100 percent. In...

This paper sets up a model of trade, in which two countries with differing levels of technology specialize on the production of subsets of the global value chain. In the open economy equilibrium, the technologically backward country exports intermediates in exchange for imports of a homogeneous...

In many downtown areas, privately operated parking garages compete with each other and with publicly operated curbside parking. Garages exercise market power by charging fees that vary with parking duration. Curbside space is scarce, and drivers have to search for it. This creates a congestion...

Zero rating and sponsored data have recently been introduced as new tariff options in mobile telecommunications markets. Both practices exempt data traffic of specific Internet services from an Internet user's download limit and thus allow for unlimited consumption of the respective content....

We analyze the effects of consumers' limited attention on welfare in a model of horizontal product differentiation. We present a novel approach of modeling limited attention: an attention radius. Each consumer only notices goods that are within her attention radius, i.e., goods that are...