Book Review

This article analyzes markets in which consumers are imperfectly informed about product quality. An important force that prevents deterioration of the quality supplied by sellers is the formation of firm-specific reputations. It is shown in general that reputations, because they can reward high...

When demand is stochastic, a monopoly offering several product varieties, each at a preannounced price, can profitably discriminate in price if nonprice rationing mechanisms, such as queuing or reservations, can determine the order in which consumers are served. But in such circumstances the...

This article is about disclosure of quality. The question that it seeks to answer is: Does the free market offer enough incentive for business to disclose? The article concludes that whether information is of purely private value or not, more than the socially-optimal amount of disclosure takes...

A model of consumer behavior is developed in which, owing to a nonconvexity in the transportation cost of obtaining the desired commodity bundle, consumers are attracted to marketplaces offering a larger variety of commodities. Impacts on marketeers' equilibrium locations and pricing strategies...

The theory of rent-seeking is that monopoly profits attract resources directed into efforts to obtain these profits and that the opportunity costs of these resources are a social cost of monopoly. This article shows that monopoly rents remain untransformed to the extent that firms are...

This study uses laboratory experiments to explore the possible consequences of a proposed rate publication policy for the domestic, dry bulk commodity transportation industry on inland waterways. The central problem is to determine the effects of a requirement that a carrier must file a proposed...

This note criticizes the methodology used by West (1981) to test the market preemption prediction of the Eaton-Lipsey model. There are problems with both the specification of the null hypothesis and the procedures used to test it. Even if West's data are used to examine his null hypothesis in...

Salant's (1976) model of cartelized resource markets with competitive fringe producers predicts an evolution of prices that lies between the Hotelling predictions for monopoly and competition. The price trajectory Salant derives is the best the cartel can enforce against competitive behavior....

An important observation in recent studies of federal resource information policy is that there may be overinvestment in acquiring resource information by the private sector in federal resource leasing. One policy conclusion is that the federal government should provide information about the...