We document the existence of pricing styles in the concert industry. Artists differ in the extent to which they rely on second- and third-degree price discrimination and in how likely they are to sell out concerts. Most strikingly, artists who use multiple seating categories are more likely to...

A recent string of theoretical papers highlights the importance of geographical distance in explaining pricing and availability of loans to small firms.Lenders located in the vicinity of small firms have significantly lower monitoring and transaction costs, and hence considerable market power if...

This paper studies the welfare implications of using market mechanisms to allocate transmission capacity in recently liberalized electricity markets. It questions whether access to this essential facility should be traded on a market, or whether the incumbent should retain exclusive usage...

Competition authorities and regulatory agencies sometimes impose pricing restrictions on firms with substantial market power — the “dominant” firms. We analyze the welfare effects of a ban on behaviour-based price discrimination in a two-period setting where the market displays a...

We propose a heteroscedastic regression model to identify the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted to small and medium sized enterprises. We interpret unexplained deviations as evidence of the banks’ discretionary use of market power in the loan rate setting...

Abstract: We study the competitive and welfare consequences when only one firm must commit to uniform pricing while the competitor’s pricing policy is left unconstrained. The asymmetric no-discrimination constraint prohibits both behaviour-based price discrimination within the competitive...

We re-examine the view that a ban on price discrimination in input markets is particularly desirable in the presence of buyer power. This argument crucially depends on an inverse relationship between downstream firms' profits and the uniform input price. Assuming different input efficiencies...

We study optimal price discrimination when a monopolist faces a continuum of consumers with reference-dependent preferences. A consumer's valuation for product quality consists of an intrinsic valuation affected by a private state signal (type), and a gain-loss valuation that depends on...

Online review aggregators, such as TripAdvisor, HotelClub and OpenTable help consumers identify the products and services that best match their preferences. The goal of this study is to understand the impact of online review aggregators on firms and consumers. We adopt Salop's circular city...