Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are exerting growing pressure on firms to eliminate product components (such as palm oil) that are harmful to the environment (such as rainforests) or replace such components with NGO-certified sustainable components. Under which conditions does NGO pressure...

We study the international protection of consumer data in a model where data usage benefits firms at the expense of their customers. We show that a multinational firm does not balance this trade-off efficiently if its data usage lacks (full) transparency or if consumers’ privacy preference...

We evaluate the effect of vehicle recalls on vehicle transactions in the second-hand market. Using a rich dataset of Dutch vehicle registrations, we exploit the quasi-experimental variation in recalls across nearly-identical cars. We find strong heterogeneities across market segment: vehicles...

We study the effects of limited attention on property prices and energy efficiency (EE) investments in the housing market. Using a novel dataset, we analyse over 5 million residential property sale transactions in England and Wales, each containing information about sale price, property and...

This paper studies the effect of advertising on content differentiation on YouTube, the second-most visited website in the world. I demonstrate that an exogenous increase in the feasible advertising quantity leads to a considerable decrease in the YouTubers’ probability to duplicate...

In credence goods markets, experts have better information about the appropriate quality of treatment than their customers. Experts may exploit their informational advantage by defrauding customers. Market institutions have been shown theoretically to be effective in mitigating fraudulent expert...

Import regulations are globally the most prevalent form of intervention in international trade. The regulations should, under rules of the WTO, protect consumers and the environment but can be used to protect producers. We investigate the ambiguity of intent. We set out a model that when applied...

Mobile payments (m-payments) increase the accessibility of large segments of society to financial services while before the traditional banking system excluded these for lack of proof of identity and because of unsafe environments. This constitutes a key driver of new growth strategies of the...

We consider a non-durable good monopoly that collects data on its customers in order to profile them and subsequently practice price discrimination on returning customers. The monopolist's price discrimination scheme is leaky, in the sense that an endogenous fraction of consumers choose to incur...

Using a Markov-perfect equilibrium model, we show that the use of customer data to practice intertemporal price discrimination will improve monopoly profit if and only if information precision is higher than a certain threshold level. This U-shaped relationship lends support to a popular view...