> The industrial organization textbook by Carlton and Perloff is good on > issues of price discrimination, quantity discounts etc. > > Alex
Sadly, I find Advanced Industrial Economics, by Stephen Martin (Blackwell 1993) a much better book in many ways. Although Carlton is a hugely talented economist (also hugely successful consultant; he recently endowed a chair at MIT), Carlton and Perloff is a talk-talk book. Too much "it can be shown that" with a citation, rather than actually showing, plus lots of summaries. Useful, but not a very good text. Martin is much better at showing how the models actually work. Lest I find myself in the middle of an antitrust dispute, I will happily stipulate for the libertarians on the list that Martin's antitrust views seem to assume that the government is different from everyone else by being benevolent and all-wise. His text is still better than Carlton and Perloff. The literature on bundling is huge. One place to start is by looking at John Lott and Russell Roberts, "A Guide to the Pitfalls of Identifying Price Discrimination" Economic Inquiry (January 1991) 29, 14-23, an important critique of empirical work on price discrimination. They point to the difficulties of separating cost explanations from price discrimination explanations. Since then, empirical papers have to confront the Lott-Roberts critique, so a citation search on Lott and Roberts is a good way to begin. Because the literature is so large, it is worth asking what sort of applications you are looking for. For example, Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian's Information Rules (the book's website is www.inforules.com) has a lot of interesting non-technical material on bundling in information goods. The references (mostly in the website, not the book) go back to the technical material. Bill Sjostrom +++++++++++++ William Sjostrom Senior Lecturer Department of Economics National University of Ireland, Cork Cork, Ireland +353-21-490-2091 (work) +353-21-427-3920 (fax) +353-21-463-4056 (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ucc.ie/~sjostrom/
