In situations of excess demand, many firms use waiting lists to allocate products and services among their customers. The resulting allocation is likely to be inefficient, creating opportunities for Pareto improving trades among those who are waiting in line. Yet, in the queuing context, the...

This paper deals with the question how to locate generally beneficial, but locally harmful facilities in accordance with citizens' procedural preferences. The analysis of survey data collected among people potentially affected by such siting decisions shows that aspects of procedural fairness...

We test the robustness of behavior in dictator games by offering allocators the choice to play an unattractive lottery. With this lottery option, mean transfers from allocators to recipients substantially decline, partly because many allocators now keep the entire endowment for themselves...

Policymakers tend to adopt too narrow a view of the creative industries when determining the desirability of copyright protection. In these industries, authors will often create new works despite weak protection. As recent developments in the music industry illustrate, markets for complements...

In the past decade Americans have increasingly turned their attention to nonlocal information sources, raising concerns about disengagement from local communities. Regulation sometimes seeks to curtail the integration of media markets through the promotion of "localism." This paper examines the...

The advent of file sharing has considerably weakened effective copyright protection. Today, more than 60% of Internet traffic consists of consumers sharing music, movies, books, and games. Yet, despite the popularity of the new technology, file sharing has not undermined the incentives of...