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...

A principal faces an agent with frame-dependent preferences and designs an extensive-form decision problem with a frame at each stage. This allows the principal to induce dynamic inconsistency and thereby circumvent incentive compatibility constraints. We show that a vector of contracts can be...

We propose a tractable framework to introduce externalities in a screening model. Agents differ in both payoff-type and influence (how strongly their actions affect others). Applications range from pricing network goods to regulating industries that create externalities. Inefficiencies arise...

We study a screening model in which agents can under-utilize goods. We characterize implementable and optimal contracts and show that, whenever the principal values usage instrumentally, the optimal menu involves multi-part tariffs with tiers of zero marginal prices. We apply our results to...

A problem that has plagued market failure discussions is: "why does bad policy exist and persist?" Various schools of thought have answered that question, but I argue that the explanations, while correct, are incomplete. In this paper, I apply the expert failure literature to the problem of...

Contracts that reference rivals' volumes (RRV contracts), such as exclusive dealing or market-share rebates, have been a long-standing concern in antitrust because of their possible exclusionary effects. We show, however, that it is more profitable for dominant firms to use these contracts to...

This chapter reviews recent theoretical work on the design of regulatory policy, focusing on the complications that arise when regulated suppliers have better information about the regulated industry than do regulators. The discussion begins by characterizing the optimal regulation of a monopoly...

This chapter proposes an analysis of the role of advertising in the transmission of information in markets. It also describes how the economic analysis of informative advertising provides a satisfactory account of advertising practices and discusses the extent to which resorting to alternative...