Whereas exchange asymmetries for goods are well known, we provide a first incentivized test of exchange asymmetries for bads (i.e., items yielding a negative utility). On the one hand, prospect theory predicts an endowment effect for goods and bads, on the other hand, attention-based theories...

We conduct a laboratory experiment that tests two fundamental predictions unique to salience theory. If an agent purchases one of two vertically differentiated products, salience theory makes the following two distinct predictions. First, it hypothesizes that a higher expected price level for...

Motivated by current topics in health economics, we apply the theory of salience to consumer policy. If a government intends to stifle healthier diets without harming consumers by raising taxes, it could initiate information campaigns which focus consumers' attention either on the healthiness of...

To help households and firms with exploding energy costs in the aftermath of the Ukraine war, a new policy called the "energy price brake" was implemented. A unique feature of this relief measure is that it provides a transfer that increases in the consumer's contractual per-unit price of...

Katz (1987), DeGraba (1990), and Yoshida (2000) have formulated theories that price discrimination bans in intermediary goods markets tend to have positive effects on allocative, dynamic and productive efficiency, respectively. We show that none of these results is robust vis-à-vis endogenous...

We re-examine the view that a ban on price discrimination in input markets is particularly desirable in the presence of buyer power. This argument crucially depends on an inverse relationship between downstream firms' profits and the uniform input price. Assuming different input efficiencies...

In contradiction to expected utility theory, various studies find that splitting events or attributes into subevents and subattributes can reverse a decision maker's choices. Most notably, these effects can induce first-order stochastic dominated choices. These violations of first-order...

We analyze evidence production in merger control as a delegation problem under an inquisitorial and an adversarial competition policy system. Agents' incentives to produce evidence depend critically on the action set of the decision maker. In an inquisitorial system, allowing ex ante for a...

Focusing theory hypothesizes a bias toward concentration according to which consumers prefer goods with one outstanding feature over those with several smaller sized upsides. In contrast to models of present-biased behavior, focusing theory prescribes also future-biased behavior if an option's...

We re-examine the Nash bargaining solution when an upstream and a downstream firm bargain over a linear input price. We show that the profit sharing rule is given by a simple and instructive formula which depends on the parties' disagreement payoffs, the profit weights in the Nash-product and...