Under continual innovation, greater patent strength expands innovating firms’ profit against imitation, but also shifts profit from current to past innovators. We show how the impact of patents on innovation, as determined by these two opposing effects, varies with industry characteristics....

A vertically integrated firm, having acquired the intellectual property (IP) through innovation to become an input monopolist, can extract surplus by supplying efficient downstream competitors. That the monopolist would refuse to do so is puzzling and has led to numerous debates in antitrust. In...

We use data from restaurants in Shanghai, China to conduct a new empirical analysis of prices and coupons. Our results show a positive relationship between prices and online coupons. Moreover, the price premium from couponing is higher for restaurants about which consumer values appear to be...

This paper studies a model in which some consumers shop on the basis of price alone, without attention to potential differences in product quality. A firm may offer a low-quality product to exploit these inattentive consumers. In the unique symmetric equilibrium of the model, firms choose prices...

Low-quality products may cause consumer harm. A firm can reduce the probability of low quality through ex ante investment before sales, and can take remedy actions such as product recalls if it learns after sales that product quality is low. An increase in the firm's product liability increases...

The effects of entry on consumer and total welfare are studied in a model of consumer search. Potential entrants differ in quality, with high-quality sellers being more likely to meet consumer needs. Contrary to the standard view in economics that more entry benefits consumers, we find that...

We extend the analysis of monopoly third-degree price discrimination to the empirically important case where marginal costs also differ between markets. Differential pricing then reallocates output to the lower-cost markets, hence welfare can increase even if total output does not, unlike under...

This paper studies a model of interpersonal bundling, in which a monopolist offers a good for sale under a regular price and a group purchase discount if the number of consumers in a group---the bundle size---belongs to some menu of intervals. We find that this is often a profitable selling...