We study the role of privacy in the market for mobile applications. For such programs used with smartphones and tablet PCs a very important market has emerged. Yet, neither the role of privacy on that market is well understood, nor do we have empirical evidence regarding its role therein. We...

This paper offers an alternative to existing economic theories of goods, which conceptualize goods as bundles of objective characteristics. We present two cases of Starbucks and Disraeli (1929 film) to show that relevant qualities of goods – along with costs and prices – emerge from the...

I investigate the dynamic effect of moral hazard on market structure in a general framework. In this model the evolution of market structure determines the severity of moral hazard and, in turn, moral hazard fuels market structure dynamics through a survival contest. In the absence of scale...

Since the 1970s, at any given movie theater, one price has been charged for all movies, seven days a week, throughout the year. This Article studies the economic and legal causes that led to the formation of this peculiar phenomenon of uniform pricing for differentiated goods. The Article...

This paper examines the contribution of 3G and 4G cellular technologies to the smartphone revolution. It relies on quasi-natural experiments in which these technologies were launched at different times and deployed at different rates across countries while the availability of handsets, operating...

We empirically study the market power of U.S. national brand manufacturers by estimating the size of markups for nationally branded products sold in the U.S. retail grocery industry. We use scanner data from a large Midwestern supermarket chain to compute several different measures of upper and...

I simulate the competitive impact of several soft drink mergers from the 1980s on equilibrium prices and quantities. An unusual feature of soft drink demand is that, at the individual purchase level, households regularly select a variety of soft drink products. Specifically, on a given trip...

We take for granted that the basic choice in public policy is between allocation of resources by government bureaucracy, on the one hand, or allocation by markets, on the other. But that dichotomy is false, and at least under contemporary circumstances it is more accurate to describe the choice...

In antitrust practice, it is often argued that independent distributors of goods have an incentive to undersupply brand-specific promotional services compared to a vertically integrated supplier. This paper outlines the conditions under which this claim is correct. Independent distributors have...