It is a disturbing experience for an academic scientist to sit through a press conference given by any biotechnology company which specialises in platform technologies. To be told that yeast can be sequenced in 6 hours or the bacterium of your choice in only 2, makes you feel as if you had to adjust to the news that somebody had jogged up Mount Everest in the same time it normally takes to run ...

Background: Industrial income differential is the most important cause of the public dissatisfaction with the income inequality in China. The high income of monopoly industries is now the typical one of the massive income inequity phenomena. But objectively speaking, not all high income of monopoly industries is unreasonable. The income differential caused by employees’ education level is reaso...

Switching costs may facilitate monopoly pricing in a market with price competition between two suppliers of a homogenous good, provided the switching cost is above some critical level. It is also well known that asymmetric size of customer bases makes monopoly pricing more difficult. Adding consumer heterogeneity to the model we demonstrate that also composition of each firm’s customer base aff...

It is well known that switching costs may facilitate monopoly pricing in a market with price competition between two suppliers of a homogenous good, provided the switching cost is above some critical level. With heterogeneous consumers and incomplete information about individual consumers’ types, monopoly pricing entails second-degree price discrimination with inefficient contracts for low dema...

This paper reviews major contributions to positive and normative theories of monopoly regulation. Although most of the reviewed results are well known, the proof are quite di erent and more accessible. The paper also stresses the limitations of proposed regulatory mechanisms. filename: mono-p.tex 1

This paper focuses on Warren Nutter’s The Extent of Enterprise Monopoly in the United States, 1899-1939. 2 This started out as a (1949) doctoral dissertation at The University of Chicago, part of Aaron Director’s Free Market Study. Besides Director, O.H. Brownlee and Milton Friedman were closely involved with supervising it. It was published by The University of Chicago Press in 1951. In the 19...

This article presents an analysis of location and pricing decisions of a monopolist about to open several stores in a compact geographical space. The number of stores is made endogenous by the introduction of fixed costs. A novel methodology is developed, by which the firm’s location and price decisions are represented as continuous functions defined over the geographical space. This modeling a...

The paper explores the idea that advertising interferes with consumers’ memories of product experiences. We consider a two-period model where a monopolist sells an experience good to a buyer who may only imperfectly recall her first period experience. When advertising activates memory, it enables learning and may induce the buyer to try out the good initially. Moreover, while costly advertising...

This appendix analyzes an example duopoly setting, which is a direct counterpart of the monopoly setting analyzed in Section 2 of the paper. The analysis shows that the results of the paper are robust with respect to several extension of my basic model. Specifically: • Appendix A.2 studies a setting where, in addition to praising themselves, firms can bad-mouth their competitors. • Appendix A.3...

We study the potential conflict between cost minimization and investment in prevention for a risky venture. A natural monopoly is regulated i) for economic purposes; ii) because it can cause losses of substantial size to third parties (the environment or people). The regulator observes the production cost without being able to distinguish the initial type (an adverse selection parameter) from t...