An economy consists of many duopolistic markets. Firms must earn normal profits in the long run if they are to survive. Normal profits are interpreted as the long-run limit of average profits in the whole economy. We adopt the aspiration based model of firm behaviour, and link it to the economy...

After some decades of relative oblivion, the interest in the optimality properties of monopolistic competition has recently re-emerged due to the availability of an appropriate and parsimonious framework to deal with firm heterogeneity. Within this framework we show that non-separable utility,...

We consider a network that intermediates traffic between free content providers and consumers. While consumers do not know the traffic cost when deciding on consumption, a content provider knows his cost but may not control the consumption. We study how pricing consumers' and content providers'...

Motivated by recent controversies surrounding the role of commercial lenders in microfinance, we analyze borrower welfare under different market structures, considering a benevolent non-profit lender, a for-profit monopolist, and a competitive credit market. To understand the magnitude of the...

Cross-country variability in regulatory frameworks, industrial policy, physician/pharmacy autonomy, brand/generic distinctions, and in the practice of medicine contributes to ambiguous interpretations of pharmaceutical cost comparisons. Here we report cross-country comparisons that: (i) focus on...

We present a perfectly-competitive model of firm boundary decisions and study their interplay with product demand, technology, and welfare. Integration is pri- vately costly but is effective at coordinating production decisions; non-integration is less costly, but coordinates relatively poorly....

Buying frenzies in which a firm intentionally undersupplies a product during its initial launch phase are a common practice within several industries such as electronics (cell phones, video games, game consoles), luxury cars, and fashion goods. We develop a dynamic model of buying frenzies that...

Consumers, when buying health insurance, do not know the exact value of each treatment that they buy coverage for. This leads them to overvalue some treatments and undervalue others. We show that the insurance market cannot correct these mistakes. This causes research labs to overinvest in...

We develop a model of vertical innovation in which firms incur a market entry cost and position themselves in the quality space. Once established, firms compete monopolistically, selling to consumers with heterogeneous tastes for quality. We establish existence and uniqueness of the pricing game...

We estimate a dynamic profit-maximization model of a fish wholesaler who can observe consumer characteristics, set individual prices, and thus engage in third-degree price discrimination. Simulated prices and quantities from the model exhibit the key features observed in a set of high quality...