An upstream firm can license its innovation to downstream firms that have to exert further development effort. There are situations in which more licenses are sold if effort is a hidden action. Moral hazard may thus increase the probability that the product will be developed.

This paper considers price determination by monopolistic sellers who know the distribution of valuations among the potential buyers. We derive a novel condition under which the optimal price set by the monopolist is unique. In many settings, this condition is easy to interpret, and it is valid...

This paper studies dynamic pricing by a monopolist selling to buyers who learn from each other’s purchases. The price posted in each period serves to extract rent from the current buyer, as well as to control the amount of information transmitted to future buyers. As information increases...

A principal contracts with agents who have diverse abilities to forecast changes in their future tastes. While the principal knows that the agent’s tastes are changing, the agent believes that with probability ?, their future preferences will be identical to their present preferences. The...

This paper uses a unique data set of Latin American paintings auctioned by Sotheby's between 1995 and 2002 to investigate several puzzles from the recent auctions literature. Our results suggest that: (1) the reputation of an artist and the provenance of the artwork, omitted variables in most...

There is a substantial theoretical literature on the potential effects of loyalty contracts, but a relative paucity of empirical work. This Paper employs the event study methodology to examine the effect of exclusionary contracts on firm performance in the ocean shipping industry. Shipping...

For many goods (such as experience goods or addictive goods), consumers' preferences may change over time. In this paper, we examine a monopolist's optimal pricing schedule when current consumption can affect a consumer's valuation in the future and valuations are unobservable. We assume that...