There has been considerable debate concerning whether consumer surplus or total surplus should be the welfare standard for antitrust. This debate misses two critical issues. First, antitrust is not straightforwardly welfarist—it does not maximize but protects, and it does not forbid all...

We examine situations in which a party must make a sunk investment prior to contracting with a second party to purchase an essential complementary input. We study how the resulting old-up problem is affected by the seller’s information about the investing party’s likely returns...

Both senders and receivers of telecommunications messages derive benefits, creating the possibility of externalities. We explore whether intercarrier compensation (i.e., access charges) can induce carriers to internalize these external effects. In important settings, access charges are...

Many products—including microprocessors, telecommunications devices, computer software and on-line auction services—make use of multiple technologies, each of which is essential to make or sell the product. The owner of one technology benefits from the existence of complementary...

The authors study the introduction of a new product in a market with network externalities. There is a common presumption that such markets exhibit excess inertia, i.e., that they are biased toward existing products. In contrast, the authors provide conditions under which equilibrium involves...

This paper relates the erosion of the custom of shotgun marriage to the legalization of abortion and the increased availability of contraception to unmarried women in the United States. The decline in shotgun marriage accounts for a significant fraction of the increase in out-of-wedlock first...