This paper studies a monopoly pricing problem when the seller can choose the timing of a trade with each buyer, and a buyer's valuation of the seller's good is the weighted sum of his and other buyers' private signals. We show that it is optimal for the seller to employ a sequential scheme that...

Significant attention has been paid to why a durable goods producer with little or no market power would monopolize the maintenance market for its own product. This paper investigates an explanation for the practice based on consumer switching costs and the decision concerning maintaining versus...

We study the informational role of prices in a stochastic environment. We provide a closed-form solution of the monopoly problem when the price imperfectly signals quality to the uninformed buyers. We then study the effect of noise on output, market price, information flows, and expected...

We present a diagrammatic and step-by-step analysis of price signaling quality. Because quality is a continuum on the real positive line, out-of-equilibrium beliefs need not be specified, i.e., every positive price is a positive outcome in equilibrium. We first study the behavior of the monopoly...

We address the issue of risk aversion in a competitive equilibrium when some buyers engage in learning and information is conveyed through the price system. Specifically, since the learning process yields uncertainty, we study the effect of risk aversion on the equilibrium outcomes of the model,...

We study the screening or nonlinear pricing for discrete consumer types when the single-crossing condition need not hold. A method is developed to reveal social eff±ciency or distortion of equilibria from market observations. The two known indicators of effciency, namely absence of almost-envy...

We study discrete-type screening without Spence-Mirrlees condition. Under non-separable and non-concave cost, all packages can be distorted in equilibrium, even when only the participation constraints are active. This and other paradoxical effects, shown by examples, are caused by some kind of...

It is shown that supplementing any usage-based pricing with a flatt-fee scheme is profit improving when the savings from transactions costs and from deadweight loss by using flat fee exceed the additional production costs. We use a most general model, without many traditionally used assumptions...

We study a multidimensional screening problem with minimal restrictions on valuations. Our ?-relaxation of the constraints excludes bunching and cycles in the graph of active incentive-compatibility constraints. Therefore, the Lagrange multipliers do exist and enable us in characterizing...

The paper provides an analysis of the second-degree price discrimination problem on a monopolistic two-sided market. In a simple framework with two distinct types of agents on market side 1, we show that under incomplete information the extent of platform access for high-demand agents is...