When bidders are not substitutes, we show that there is no standard ascend-ing auction that implements a bidder-optimal competitive equilibrium under truthful bidding. Such an impossibility holds also in environments where the Vickrey payoff vector is a competitive equilibrium payoff and is thus...

The demand for organic fresh fruits and vegetable continues to grow at a rate far higher than the rest of the produce industry. The cost of meeting organic certification standards, however, has meant that supply has been slow to adjust. With limited supply, we hypothesize that organic suppliers...

We develop an analytical framework to investigate the competitiveimplications of personalized pricing and quality allocation (PPQ),whereby rms charge di¤erent prices and o¤erdi¤erent qualities to di¤erent consumers, based on theirwillingness to pay. We embed PPQ in a model of...

Should the European Union grant state aid through an institution like the European Investment bank? This paper evaluates the efficiency of different measures for grant-ing state aid. We use a theoretical model with firms that differ in their creditworthiness and compare different types of...

Textbooks present the three ‘degrees’ of price discrimination as a sequence of independent pricing methods. These textbook treatments consequently provide inadequate insight as to when a firm might adopt a particular pricing strategy. The paper describes an informationbased taxonomy of price...

We estimate the price elasticity of prescription drug use in Medicare Part D, which features a non-linear price schedule due to a coverage gap. We analyze patterns of drug utilization prior to the coverage gap, where the “effective price” is higher than the actual copayment for drugs because...