Volume 15, Issue 1 -

With the prevalence of cloud computing emerges the challenges of pricing cloud computing services. There are various characteristics of cloud computing which make the problem unique. We study an abstract model which focuses on one such aspect – the sale of a homogeneous and fully divisible good. We cast onto our model the idea of bundling, studied within the context of monopolist pricing of indivisible goods. We demonstrate how selling a divisible good as an indivisible one may increase seller revenues and characterize when this phenomenon occurs, and the corresponding gain factors.

This paper builds a general oligopolistic equilibrium model based on Neary (2009. “International Trade in General Oligopolistic Equilibrium,” University of Oxford and CEPR, Working Paper) to investigate the relationship between trade liberalization and competition levels. In a closed economy, a decrease in competition negatively affects a country’s welfare and reallocates factors from low marginal cost sectors to high marginal cost sectors. However, in an open economy with trade liberalization, the properties of factor reallocation give a country the incentive to adopt a beggar-thy-neighbor policy, which decreases its competition level and maximizes its own welfare under certain conditions. Hence, international coordination of competition policies could possibly increase both world welfare and trade.

It is well known that externalities cause fundamental non-convexity problems in the production set. We demonstrate that the differentiable approach is a proper tool. Existence of equilibrium obtains without requiring aggregate convexity in consumption or production. Our model allows general externalities in consumption and production and also price dependency.

This study considers how to implement an efficient allocation of a financial intermediation model, including liquidation costs. The main result shows that there is a mechanism such that, for any liquidation cost, an efficient allocation is implementable in strictly dominant strategies. There is no need for third-party assistance, such as deposit insurance. In addition, the mechanism is tolerant of a small, unexpected shock caused by premature withdrawals.

We examine how a tax on cigarettes would be affected by endogeneity of their addictiveness. In our model, the rationale for government intervention is based on internalities and externalities. While a corrective tax could be imposed to address these two distortions, it may result in excessive nicotine consumption per cigarette. This suggests that tax rates should be moderated. We consider two types of behavior that affect the addictiveness of cigarettes. First, producers can manipulate the nicotine content of tobacco products. Second, consumers are able to adjust the intensity of their smoking. We show that there may still be a case for a corrective tax. However, tax policies and attainable welfare depend on whether the nicotine dose from each cigarette is influenced by producers or consumers.

In this paper we consider a model of Bertrand oligopoly when consumers are boundedly rational and make their purchase decisions probabilistically, according to the Luce model. We consider three different cases: first, we characterize equilibrium when firms face boundedly rational consumers with the fixed irrationality parameter λ$$\lambda $$; second, we discuss the case of obfuscating oligopoly, when firms can invest in order to confuse consumers, i.e. to increase their λ$$\lambda $$; and third, we consider educating oligopoly, when firms can choose to invest to decrease λ$$\lambda $$. We show that while it is worthwhile for the firms to confuse the consumers, it is only optimal to educate them if they are sufficiently rational at default. We also analyze how the social welfare, consumer surplus and the firms’ profits depend on the number of firms.