With new technologies that enable insurers to electronically monitor vehicles and drivers, insurers should be able to price automobile insurance more accurately, creating individualized prices for consumers. The welfare effects of lower prices are straightforward, but we also consider that...

This paper offers an economic rationale for compulsory licensing of needed medicines in developing countries. The patent system is based on a trade-off between the “deadweight losses†caused by market power and the incentive to innovate created by increased profits from monopoly...

This paper examines puzzling behavior in industries in which one firm is able to obtain a price premium and/or a dominant market share for a product which is identical to that of its rivals. It is shown that when there is learning by doing, economies of scale, network externalities, or...

We introduce the Irish loan funds, a set of independent but regulated microcredit societies, which in the mid-nineteenth century were lending to 20% of Irish households. Their institutional evolution is traced from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. This system was remarkably successful...

This paper investigates whether the contractual exclusion of third-party extended warranties should be legally permissible, using a model incorporating consumer heterogeneity. The welfare effects of competition in the market for extended warranties are shown to depend on the degree of...

With new technologies that enable insurers to electronically monitor vehicles and drivers, insurers should be able to price automobile insurance more accurately, creating individualized prices for consumers. The welfare effects of lower prices are straightforward, but we also consider that...

Parallel imports are genuine products imported without the authorization of the trademark or copyright owner in a country. Authorized dealers have employed trademark and copyright law to exclude parallel imports using claims of infringement. Our assertion is that trademark and copyright laws are...

The problem of obtaining fair pricing for generic drugs has led to a series of regulatory measures in Canadian provinces. This paper offers a new way of thinking about the problems that need to be addressed, by considering three core components of the value chain of getting generic drugs to...

The Health Impact Fund (Hollis & Pogge 2008) is an innovative financing mechanism for global drug discovery and dissemination, separating the reward for successful R&D from the market price of the drug, also known as de-linkage. Aaron Kesselheim and Kevin Outterson have recently proposed a...