This paper provides an empirical analysis of cattle auctions taking place in Amstetten, Austria. The particular auctions we focus on are ascending or English auctions. In this market the sellers are usually farmers and the buyers are either farmers as well or resale trade firms. A further...

Stimulus-response (SR) and belief-based learning (BBL) models are estimated with experimental data from sender-receiver games and compared using the Davidson and MacKinnon P-test for non-nested hypotheses. Depending on a certain adjustment parameter, the P-test favors the SR model, the BBL model...

In the literature on international trade, very little attention has been given to informational asymmetries between firms and consumers with respect to product quality. The few economic models that analyze the question of how asymmetric information about product quality might affect trade flows...

The literature on research joint ventures (RJVs) has emphasized internalizing spillovers and cost-sharing as motives for RJV formation. In this paper we develop two additional explanations: product market complementarities and firm heterogeneity. We analyze a model of RJVs with asymmetric firms...

We extend the standard model of information cascades to situations where agents have to choose between switching to a new alternative or not. In particular, we add two new features to the standard model. First, agents continue to receive signals after they have chosen 'switching'; and second...

Recent developments in the literature on market structure have allowed the generation of a few key testable predictions from the theory of strategic behaviour. The seminal model considers one simple but general relationship, that between market structure and market size, focusing on the...

Despite its importance, the impact of vertical organization on innovation incentives has not been investigated in depth. This paper develops a number of testable hypotheses and then provides a first exploratory empirical analysis, using cross-sectional industry-level data. Two simple stylized...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of optimal learning in repeated coordination games. We find evidence for such learning when we limit both the cognitive demands on players and the information available to them. We also find that uniqueness of the optimal strategy is no guarantee...

This paper explores how efficiency promotes the use of structure in language. It starts from the premise that one of language’s central characteristics is to provide a means for saying novel things about novel circumstances, its creativity. It is reasonable to expect that in a rich and...