We are very sorry to report that Jane Martin, the Review's administrator for many years, passed away on 26 September 2009. As a tribute to her, we reproduce here a short extract from a reading at her funeral service: Since 1997, Jane was the administrator and production editor for the The Review of Economic Studies. In that post she blossomed, and with her literary and technical skills, her goodwill, quick wit, helpfulness and sense of humour became the hub for the ever-changing cast of editors, referees and authors. I knew Jane more or less from when she joined the journal, first as one of her editors and more recently as Chairman of the journal. Although physically frail, Jane had a strong and unflappable personality. She must have corresponded with an astonishing number of people over the years, many of whom had large egos and—if they had received a rejection letter from the editors, say—were not necessarily on their best behaviour. Jane invariably calmed the stormy waters. The fact that the journal has such a loyal community of board members, authors and referees is due in very large part to her sure touch at the helm. I never did hear a critical word about Jane from anyone.

This paper analyses optimal auctions of several objects. In the first model bidders have a binary distribution over their valuations for each object, in which case the optimal auction is efficient. The optimal auction takes one of two formats: either objects are sold in independent auctions, or a degree of bundling is introduced in the sense that the probability a bidder wins one object is increasing in her value for the other. The format of the optimal auction may depend upon the number of bidders. In the second model the restriction to binary distributions is relaxed, and the optimal auction is then inefficient.

Determining the optimal selling strategy for a multiproduct firm facing consumers with unobservable tastes is a difficult task. This paper aims to show how almost optimal nonlinear tariffs can often be found when the number of products is large. Moreover, such tariffs take a simple form: (i) when taste parameters are independently distributed across products, the almost optimal tariff is a single cost-based two-part tariff which can extract virtually all consumer surplus; (ii) when tastes are correlated across products, perhaps because of income differences across consumers, the almost optimal tariff can be implemented as a menu of two-part tariffs each of which has prices proportional to marginal costs.

Typically, work on mechanism design has assumed that all private information can be captured in a single scalar variable. This paper explores one way in which this assumption can be relaxed in the context of the multiproduct nonlinear pricing problem. It is shown that the firm will choose to exclude some low-value consumers from all markets. A class of cases that allow explicit solution is derived by making use of a multivariate form of 'integration by parts.' In such cases the optimal tariff is cost-based. Copyright 1996 by The Econometric Society.

This paper discusses the interaction between competition and price regulation in telecommunications markets. First, we discuss how to achieve efficient entry when an incumbent's regulated retail prices are out of line with its costs. Second, the analysis is extended to the case where entrants need to purchase network services from the incumbent. Except in the extreme case where entrants have no alternative but to use the incumbent's network to provide their own services, I argue that (i) retail instruments should be used to combat retail-level distortions such as universal service obligations, and (ii) network access charges should be equal to the incumbent's cost of access (excluding opportunity costs) in order to achieve productive efficiency.

We examine competitive nonlinear pricing in a model in which consumers have heterogeneous and elastic demands and can buy from more than one supplier.It is an equilibrium for firms to offer a menu of efficient two-part tariffs.Compared with linear pricing, nonlinear pricing tends to raise profit but harm consumers when: (i) demand is elastic, (ii) there is substantial heterogeneity in consumer demand, (iii) consumers face substantial shopping costs when buying from more than one firm, and (iv) a consumer's brand preference for one product is correlated with her brand preference for another product.Nonlinear pricing is more likely to lead to welfare gains when (iii) and (iv) hold, but (ii) does not.

In many countries throughout the world, regulators are struggling to determine whether and how to introduce competition into regulated industries. This essay examines the complexities involved in the liberalization process. While stressing the importance of case-specific analyses, this essay distinguishes liberalization policies that generally are procompetitive from corresponding anticompetitive liberalization policies.

We study multiproduct firms in the contexts of unregulated monopoly, regulated monopoly, and Cournot oligopoly. Using the concept of consumer surplus as a function of quantities (rather than prices), we present simple formulas for optimal prices and show that Cournot equilibrium exists and corresponds to a Ramsey optimum. We then discuss a tractable class of preferences that involve a generalized form of homotheticity. Profit-maximizing quantities are proportional to efficient quantities. We discuss optimal monopoly regulation when the firm has private information about its cost vector and find situations in which optimal regulation leaves relative price decisions to the firm.