This paper tests the empirical importance of the price dispersion predictions of the Prescott-Eden-Dana (PED) models. Equilibrium price dispersion is derived in a setting with costly capacity and demand uncertainty where different fares can be explained by the different selling probabilities....

"Between 1810 and 1939, real per capita spending on patent medicines grew by a factor of 114; real per capita GDP by a factor of 5. The long-term growth and survival this industry is puzzling when juxtaposed with standard historical accounts, which typically portray patent medicines as quack...

The so called flat-rate bias is a well documented phenomenon caused by consumers’ desire to be insured against fluctuations in their billing amounts. This paper shows that expectation-based loss aversion provides a formal explanation for this bias. We solve for the optimal two-part tariff when...

There has been wide interest in private supply of roads as a solution to traffic congestion. We study its efficiency under demand uncertainty: we solve for equilibrium and optimum as benchmarks, and evaluate the efficiency of possible regulatory policies for private road operators. We obtain...

Microeconomic theory predicts that under certain regularity conditions higher idiosyncratic risk increases the propensity to insure against independent marketable risks. We apply these predictions to the specific case of labor income risk and car insurance using data from the UK. The main...