This Paper studies the consequences of price discrimination in a market for experts’ services. In the case of experts markets, where the expert observes the intervention that a consumer needs to fix his problem and also provides a treatment, price discrimination proceeds along the dimension of...

This paper studies the factors determining plant size and interplant output allocation within the boundaries of a multiplant firm under conditions of demand uncertainty. It shows that asymmetric information between headquarters and individual plants is one factor determining plant size and...

In recent years various contributions have analyzed the credence goods problem under a wide variety of assumptions yielding equilibria exhibiting various degrees of inefficiencies and fraud. The variety of results has fostered the impression that the equilibrium behaviour of experts and...

This paper adopts the incomplete contracting perspective to study a firm’s continuous choice between producing an essential input in-house (full integration), contracting part of the production out (tapered integration), and contracting all of the production out (non-integration), when (i) an...

This paper studies price competition between experts and discounters in a market for credence goods. While experts can identify a consumer's problem by exerting costly but unobservable diagnosis effort, discounters just sell treatments without giving any advice. The unobservability of diagnosis...

This paper analyses the impact of variations of product demand on the amount of internal slack in multi-plant firms in a model in which facilities can produce output at a privately known cost up to a previously-determined capacity level. In such a model, the amount of slack in the firm is shown...

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the role of life expectancy for optimal schooling and lifetime labor supply. The results of a simple prototype Ben-Porath model with age-specific survival rates show that an increase in lifetime labor supply is not a necessary, nor a...

Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson and Yared (2008) document that the cross-country correlation between income per capita and democracy disappears once including country fixed effects. This paper tests the hypothesis that the effect of income on democracy might differ systematically across countries. A...

We propose a unified growth theory to investigate the mechanics generating the economic and demographic transition, and the role of mortality differences for comparative development. The framework can replicate the quantitative patterns in historical time series data and in contemporaneous...

Incentive schemes affect performance and priorities of agents but, in reality, they can be complicated even for simple tasks. We analyze the effects of the salience of incentives in a team production setting where the principal has an interest in quantity and quality of output. We use data from...