In a market for a homogeneous good where firms are identical, compete in quantities and produce with constant returns, the percentage of welfare losses (PWL) is small with as few as five competitors for a class of demand functions which includes linear and isoelastic cases. We study markets with...

This essay is written for a Festschrift to commemorate Jürgen Backhaus's contribution to law and economics in recognition of his long service as Editor of the European Journal of Law and Economics. Scholars of law and economics have long been intrigued by the possibility that legal processes...

A large number of financial assets are traded in both exchanges and over-the-counter markets (i.e., centralized and decentralized markets, CM and DM hereafter, respectively). Moreover, the last century has witnessed the secular migration of asset trading from CM to DM. To this end, this paper...

We study consumer surplus in a single market when a) there is a lower bound in the consumption of the outside good and b) the weights in the social welfare function given to consumers and firms are different. We assume quasilinear utility. When the lower bound constraint on the consumption of...

This paper quantifies the economic costs of distortions in managerial forecasts. We match a unique managerial survey run by the Bank of Italy with administrative data on firm balance sheets and income statements. The resulting dataset allows us to observe a long panel of managerial forecast...

Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design. We study a buyer-seller market in which agents have private information about both...

Belief disagreement generates a fundamental tension between two desirable features of a resource allocation: Pareto optimality and risk sharing. While Pareto optimality generally opposes restrictions to trade, a growing literature rejects it in the presence of heterogeneous beliefs and proposes...

Despite the availability of low-cost exchanges, over-the-counter (OTC) trading is pervasive for most assets. We explain the prevalence of OTC trading using a model of adverse selection, in which informed and uninformed investors choose to trade over-the-counter or on an exchange. OTC dealers'...

For school choice (priority-based allocation) problems, when the priority structure is acyclic, the associated student-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm is Pareto efficient and group strategy-proof (Ergin, 2002). We reveal a hidden iterative removal structure behind such deferred...

The Rule of Reason, which has come to dominate modern antitrust law, allows defendants the opportunity to justify their conduct by demonstrating “procompetitive” effects. Seizing the opportunity, defendants have begun offering increasingly numerous and creative explanations for their...