In many downtown areas, privately operated parking garages compete with each other and with publicly operated curbside parking. Garages exercise market power by charging fees that vary with parking duration. Curbside space is scarce, and drivers have to search for it. This creates a congestion...

There is much debate on how the flow of information between firms should be organized, and whether existing privacy laws should be amended.We offer a welfare comparison of the three main current policies towards consumer privacy - anonymity, opt in, and opt out - within a two-period model of...

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...

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...

We study the relationship between competition and price discrimination through an empirical examination of hourly price schedules in the parking garage industry. We find that the degree of price schedule curvature decreases with competition, implying a greater proportionate drop in low-end...

We study a tractable two-dimensional model of price discrimination. Consumers combine a rigid with a more flexible choice, such as choosing the location of a house and its quality or size. We show that the optimal pricing scheme involves no bundling if consumer types are affiliated. Conversely,...

We study third degree price discrimination in intermediate good markets, in which costs of production for the downstream firms are determined by their investment choices. We focus on the effect of the sequence of firm actions and analyze two models with different timing of investments, before or...

Conventional wisdom attributes different economic outcomes of uniform pricing and price discrimination to the heterogeneity in market conditions or market participants, such as differences in demand elasticity or production costs. We offer a new explanation for the observed differences that...