Traditional analyses of industrial behavior typically link the exercise of market power in an industry to internal features such as demand conditions, concentration, and barriers-to-entry. Nevertheless, some economists have remained concerned that external factors, such as contact across...

In providing rewards to innovators, there is a tradeoff between patent length and breadth. This article provides conditions under which the optimal patent policy involves infinitely-lived patents, with patent breadth adjusting to provide the required reward for innovation.

Scale economies in industrial plants confer a tradeoff on firms between the capacity of production facilities and the average cost of production. This tradeoff is central to firms' capacity expansion decisions in growing industries. This article imbeds the cost versus capacity tradeoff in an...

This article provides an empirical analysis of the practices used in referrals of legal work made by one lawyer to another. I examine a major change in referral practices that has evidently been caused by four important changes in the market for lawyers -- the innovation of advertising by...

This article tests hypotheses on the distribution of power within unionized firms by measuring which workers' preferences determine the level of firm-supplied occupational safety. An egalitarian model in which all workers have equal impact can be easily rejected, as can a median-worker model....

This article examines licensing as a means of choosing the competitors which a patentee-monopolist will face in the period after the patent expires. The queue of entrants consists of two firms which differ in their relative "strengths" as competitors (for example, by size or level of marginal...

In this article I propose a monopolistic competition framework to analyze the effects of different disclosure rules used by trade associations on the incentives to share information and on the welfare of consumers, firms, and society. This framework is appropriate whenever a single firm cannot...

This article extends my previous work on price adjustment in long-term