A premise of general equilibrium theory is that private goods are rival. Nevertheless, many private goods are shared, e.g., through borrowing, through coownership, or simply because one person’s consumption affects another person’s wellbeing. I analyze consumption externalities from the perspective of club theory, and argue that, provided consumption externalities are limited in scope, they can...

Private label growth in Australia has not kept pace with the growth in private labels elsewhere. This research paper establishes that the odds of a consumer being highly pleased with a store label product when they are supportive of the quality of private labels, is more than the odds of the consumer being highly satisfied when purchasing private label products simply because they are priced si...

We show that efficient anonymous incentive compatible (dominant strategy) mechanisms for public goods eliminate externalities, i.e., each individual is unable to change the welfare of anyone else. The characterization is used to derive existence and non-existence results for models with a finite number of individuals and to explain existence results in the continuum. A similar characterization ...

Special Note: Chain retailers are very conscious of the need to carry only private-label models/styles that are easy and less expensive to produce so they can sell their private-label shoes at attractively lower prices than name brand athletic footwear. As a consequence of their efforts to order only models/styles that are simpler to produce, production run set-up costs for private-label pairs ...

We prove by construction that ex post incentive compatible mechanisms exist in a private goods setting with multi-dimensional signals and interdependent values. The mechanism shares features with the generalized Vickrey auction of onedimensional signal models. The construction implies that for environments with private goods, informational externalities (i.e., interdependent values) are compati...

Most pure public goods like lighthouses, dams, or national defense provide utility mainly by insuring against hazardous events. Our paper focuses on this insurance character of public goods. As for private actions against hazardous events, one can distinguish between self-insurance (SI) and self-protection (SP) also in the context of public goods. For both cases of SI and SP we analyze efficien...