When firms' shrouding of charges, as in Gabaix and Laibson (2006), meets with consumers' salient thinking, as in Bordalo et al. (2013), this can have severe welfare implications. The ensuing excessive competition for headline prices tends to inefficiently bias consumers' choice towards...

We develop a model to analyze the social optimality of growth and product variety. The model contains two sectors, one assembly sector producing a homogeneous consumption good and one intermediate goods sector producing differentiated inputs. Growth results from R&D performed in the intermediate...

This paper examines the output effect of third-degree price discrimination in symmetrically differentiated oligopoly. We find that when the sellers' input costs are chosen endogenously by an upstream supplier with market power, as opposed to being fixed exogenously, long-standing qualitative...

Digital platforms operate in multisided markets providing services through the internet to two or more distinct groups of users, between which there are indirect network effects. Direct network effects are frequently present within each group. Therefore, online platforms usually present both...

How are the welfare costs from monopoly distributed across U.S. households? We answer this question for the U.S. credit card industry, which is highly concentrated, charges interest rates that are 3.4 to 8.8 percentage points above perfectly competitive pricing, and has repeatedly lost antitrust...

Conventional microeconomic theory, founded and developed mainly by the neoclassical economists, contains some fundamental mistakes that lead economic theory to erroneous conclusions about how the economy operates and the results of this operation. Unfortunately, those mistakes have still...

I develop a model in which a duopoly of credit rating agencies endogenously use issuers as messengers to find out each other's assessments before offering ratings. Information flows between rating agencies when (i) rating agencies' incentives are aligned due to both of their ratings being...

Using estimable concepts, this paper provides sufficient conditions for third-degree price discrimination to increase or decrease aggregate output, social welfare, and consumer surplus in differentiated oligopoly when all discriminatory markets are open even in the absence of price...

During the second half of the twentieth-century economic theory moved increasingly away from price theory, which was gradually displaced by more modern trends such as game theory, behavioral-empirical-experimental economics, neuroeconomics, heterodox economics, etc. This was due to serious...