W study markets for information goods and find that they differ significantly from markets for traditional industrial goods. Markets for information goods in which products are vertically differentiated lack the segmentation inherent in markets for industrial goods. As a result, a monopoly will offer only a single product. Competition leads to highly concentrated information-good markets, with ...

It is well known that ad valorem taxes welfare-dominate specific taxes under monopoly. This paper demonstrates that the comparative welfare ranking of the two instruments reverses under monopsony. The relative performance of alternative tax forms is thus highly sensitive to whether the buyer or seller has market power.

We examine the intricacies associated with the design of revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a monopolist who expects her buyers to resell. We consider two cases: resale to a third party who does not participate in the primary market and interbidder resale, where the winner resells to the losers. To influence the resale outcome, the monopolist must design an allocation rule and a disclosure polic...

The ability of a monopoly seller to prevent resale is often presented as a necessary condition for first degree price discrimination. In this paper, we explore this claim and show that, even with costless arbitrage markets, price discrimination may continue to be both feasible and profit maximizing despite potential resale. With finite numbers of consumers, arbitrage markets may be ‘thin’, in t...