I study the question of how much product information should be available to consumers. A monopolist sells one unit of product. The consumer is initially uninformed of the product value but can incur costs to observe a noisy signal of his valuation. I show that consumer surplus can be increasing...

We study rebate mechanisms according to which a monopolist selling a product introduces rebates as function of the volume of buyers. This enables the firm to induce payoff externalities that ordinarily do not exist. The monopoly firm sells an indivisible good to a mass of consumers with...

Consumer surplus in a market is affected by how the market is segmented. We study the maximum consumer surplus across all possible segmentations of a given market served by a multi product monopolist. We characterize markets for which the maximum consumer surplus equals a first best benchmark...

This paper investigates the welfare effects of private investments prior to trade. A seller of a durable good can privately invest on changing its quality. After the investment, she receives a take-it-or-leave-it offer from a buyer. Both the seller and the buyer value more goods of higher...

In an environment that features second-degree price discrimination, this paper fully characterizes the set of surplus divisions that can arise from all possible information consumers have about their valuation. By extending the techniques developed in a companion paper (Yang, 2019a), I show that...

This paper explores the buyer-optimal information structures in a monopolistic screening context with nonlinear production technology. It shows that the buyer's optimal surplus may increase even when the production cost becomes more uncertain or when the efficient surplus decreases. Under a...

A monopolist produces a good for sale to a buyer with uncertain valuation. The seller seeks to implement a profit-maximizing non-linear pricing scheme, which includes the time at which the good is shipped to the consumer. If the buyer discounts future payoffs and the seller does not, then...

We analyze, by means of a formal economic model, the use of price-cost tests to assess the competitive effects of loyalty discounts. In the model, a dominant firm enjoys a competitive advantage over its rivals and uses loyalty discounts as a means to boost the demand for its product. We show...

We study the use of information control to mitigate hold-up risks. We identify a distinction between asymmetric information that creates an ex-ante investment incentive and asymmetric information that causes ex-post inefficiency, which then allows ex-post inefficiency to be eliminated without...

We characterize optimal voluntary disclosures by a privately informed agent facing a counterparty endowed with market power in a bilateral transaction. Although disclosures reveal some of the agent's private information, they may increase his information rents by mitigating the counterparty's...