Asymmetric information is a classic example of market failure that undermines the efficiency associated with perfectly competitive market outcomes: the “lemons” market. Credible certification, that substantiates unobservable characteristics of products that consumers value, is often...

The nature, and normative properties, of competition in health care markets has long been the subject of much debate. In this paper we consider what the optimal benchmark is in the presence of moral hazard effects on consumption due to health insurance. Intuitively, it seems that imperfect...

We compare monopoly profit, consumer surplus, and total welfare associated with three commonly-used tying strategies: no tying, pure tying, and mixed tying. Whereas previous literature focused mainly on profit comparisons, this paper evaluates the relationship between component production costs...

Abstract We study the welfare implications of personalized pricing, an extreme form of third-degree price discrimination implemented with machine learning for a large, digital firm. We conduct a randomized controlled pricing field experiment to train a demand model and to conduct inferences...

This paper studies third degree price discrimination in a monopolistically competitive market. When the number of firms is fixed, price discrimination raises firm profit and reduces consumer welfare relative to uniform pricing. In the long run, the equilibrium product variety under price...

Is wellbeing higher if the same number of negative events is spread out rather than bunched in time? Should positive events be spread out or bunched? We answer these questions exploiting quarterly data on six positive and twelve negative life events in the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics...