MET Seminar - Pietro Dall'Ara (Naples)
| Dates: | 29 October 2025 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Current University students |
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Title: Screening in digital monopolies
Author: Pietro Dall'Ara
Abstract: A defining feature of digital goods is that damaging and replication are costless: once a high-quality good is produced, lower-quality versions can be created and distributed at no additional cost. This paper studies screening in markets for digital goods. Unlike in nonlinear pricing à la Mussa and Rosen (1978), production costs only depend on the highest quality supplied and are not separable across delivered qualities. A new productive inefficiency emerges: the monopolist underinvests in the highest quality compared to the efficiency benchmark. As a result, the standard “efficiency at the top” result is weakened to distributional efficiency. The welfare comparison between monopoly and competition is ambiguous: while competition exacerbates productive inefficiency, it improves on monopoly in terms of distributional efficiency.
Contact: sophie.kreutzkamp@manchester.ac.uk
Travel and Contact Information
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Williamson_4.08 Seminar Room
Williamson Building
Manchester
