We discuss the impact of consumer protection policies on consumer incentives to become informed of the best deals available in the market. In a market with costly consumer search, we find that imposing a cap on suppliers' prices reduces the incentive to engage in search, with the result that...

We present a model in which a principal delegates the choice of project to an agent with different preferences. The principal determines the set of projects from which the agent may choose. The principal can verify the characteristics of the project chosen by the agent, but does not know which...

Contingent charges for financial services, such as fees for unauthorized overdrafts, are often controversial. We study the economics of contingent charges in a stylized setting with naive and sophisticated consumers. We contrast situations where the naive benefit from the presence of...

We examine the impact of multiproduct nonlinear pricing on profit, consumer surplus and welfare in a duopoly. When consumers buy all their products from one firm (the one-stop shopping model), nonlinear pricing leads to higher profit and welfare, but often lower consumer surplus, than linear...

We provide a simple necessary and sufficient condition for when a multiproduct demand system can be generated from a discrete choice model with unit demands.

This paper examines the implications of "prominence" in search markets.  We model prominence by supposing that the prominent firm will be sampled first by all consumers.  If there are no systematic quality differences among firms, we find that the prominent firm will charge a lower price than...

We present a model in which a principal delegates the choice of project to an agent with different preferences. A project`s characteristics are verifiable once presented to the principal, but the principal does not know how many projects are available to the agent. The principal chooses the set...

We examine the impact of multiproduct nonlinear pricing on profit, consumer surplus and welfare in a duopoly. When consumers buy all their products from one firm (the one-stop shopping model), nonlinear pricing leads to higher profit and welfare, but often lower consumer surplus, than linear...

This paper examines the implications of “prominence” in search markets. We modelprominence by supposing that the prominent firm will be sampled first by all consumers.If there are no systematic quality differences among firms, we find that the prominentfirm will charge a lower price than its...