Due to high levels of obesity, various government interventions have been proposed to curb the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs). The New York City "soda-ban," which proposed to limit the size of SSBs is among the most well-known and controversial. While public debates about...

This paper analyzes optimal product lines when consumers differ both in their taste for quality and in their desire for social image. The market outcome features partial pooling and product differentiation that is not driven by heterogeneous valuations for quality but by image concerns. A...

Summary We investigate time consistency of monetary valuations, also called monetary risk measures or monetary utility functions. Through a number of recent research contributions, it has become clear that time consistency imposes strong constraints on families of monetary valuations conditioned...

This paper analyzes the optimal choice of pricing schedules andtechnological deterrence levels in a market with digital piracy wheresellers can influence the degree of piracy by implementing digitalrights management (DRM) systems. It is shown that a monopolist’soptimal pricing schedule can be...

This paper studies whether competition may induce firms abandoningdeceptive pricing strategies aimed to profit from mistaken choices ofconsumers. The empirical analysis focuses on the pricing practices ofearly U.S. cellular firms, both under monopoly and duopoly. Foggy tariffoptions are those...

We develop and analyze a model of pricing for digital products withdiscontinuous supply functions. This characterizes a number ofinformation technology-based products and services for which variableincreases in demand are fulfilled by the addition of 'blocks' ofcomputing or network...

For many services, consumers can choose among a range of optional tariffs that differ in their access and usage prices. Recent studies indicate that tariff-specific preferences may lead consumers to choose a tariff that does not minimize their expected billing rate. This study analyzes how...

The so called flat-rate bias is a well documented phenomenon caused by consumers' desire to be insured against fluctuations in their billing amounts. This paper shows that expectation-based loss aversion provides a formal explanation for this bias. We solve for the optimal two-part tariff when...