Disclosure has long been the preferred regulatory approach to prevent one-sided standard-form contract terms, but its efficacy is unclear. For disclosure to be effective, it must increase readership of contracts and, conditional on reading, affect decisions. I use clickstream data on software...

Global Recession to Global Recovery: It is well known fact that all good things, as also bad things, come to an end and business cycles pass through good and bad economic times. Economically 2010 was a year of transition from economic recession to recovery. Economies were improving in some...

Nobody reads fine print — even when it matters. The most common regulatory approach to attenuate the (perceived) problem of non-readership has long been mandatory disclosure. Despite it’s theoretical appeal, disclosure has not been found to be fully effective in practice. In More Than You...

Digital platforms use recommendations to facilitate the exchange between platform actors, such as trade between buyers and sellers. Platform actors expect, and legislators increasingly require that competition, including recommendations, are fair—especially for a market-dominating platform on...

Distribution systems for food can change quickly in emergent markets, requiring new competences for consumers, and even in some European countries we have seen considerable changes in the distribution system for food in recent decades, raising the question whether consumers have acquired...

In 2007, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued 276 recalls of toys and other children's products, a sizeable increase from previous years. The overwhelming majority of the 2007 toy recalls were due to high levels of lead content and almost all of these toys were manufactured in...

This paper shows that two related aspects of attention platforms are important for the sound economic analysis of public policy including antitrust: First, attention platforms generate valuable content. Even though people often don't pay for content, we know from revealed preference that content...

The Rule of Reason, which has come to dominate modern antitrust law, allows defendants the opportunity to justify their conduct by demonstrating “procompetitive” effects. Seizing the opportunity, defendants have begun offering increasingly numerous and creative explanations for their...

The policy of rebalancing tariffs in the newly liberalised telecommunications market has given rise to concerns about universal service issues. The rise of connection and rental charges threatens to increase the number of disconnections and burden low-income groups in a disproportionate manner....

The non-monetary costs consumers experience from regulations are challenging to quantify, and thus easily overlooked. Using quasi-experimental policy variation and high-frequency supermarket data, this paper identifies previously hidden time costs from policies that ban or tax the use of...