We model international rivalry between a domestic firm that is going through a leaming-by-doing phase, and a mature foreign rival. We show that the optimal production subsidy for the domestic firm depends on the degree of strategic sophistication of the foreign firm.Optimal production subsidy...

Several authors have shown that the opening of trade may be harmful if natural resources are exploited under the open-access regime. These authors assume that property rights regimes are exogenously given, and are the same before and after the opening of trade. In this paper, we model the...

We show that the cost of sorting and the network effects jointly determine the rate of participation of consumers in the process of recycling. The dominant producer of virgin material takes into account the recycling activities when it makes its pricing decision. The network effects can create...

We present an overlapping generations economy populated by heterogeneous agents who care about their consumption relative to others and the bequest they leave to their offspring. In the presence of positional concerns individual saving and bequest rates vary across the income distribution. This...

We introduce a dynamic model of resource-grabbing by status-conscious agents, i.e., agents value not only their absolute consumption levels, but also the relative status within their reference group. We explore the effect of the concern for relative consumption on the growth rate and the welfare...

We investigate the effect of stock discovery on the profits of non-identical oligopolists. We show that a uniform addition to all stocks could harm firms that are originally larger than average. One conclusion that could be drawn from the results is that a new technology that leads to more...

We show that, even with flexible domestic wages, international outsourcing may worsen the welfare of the home country and reduce the profits of all firms. If wages are rigid, outsourcing is welfare-improving if and only if the sum of the "trade creation" effect and the "exploitation effect"...

Ranking development programs using integrals of discounted utilities can yield drastic consequences that offend our sense of justice. New alternative social welfare criteria should be considered. A reaction to discounted utilitarianism is to moderate its effects by adding to the social welfare...

We consider a benchmark static incentive scheme, i.e. a per unit subsidy, that induces a monopoly to produce a target output level. We show that the same output level can be achieved by a continuum of dynamic subsidy rules based on a performance indicator. The subsidy rules require only local...

Government behaviour is traditionally represented in an exogenous or an undemocratic fashion. Given the democratic context of most Western free-market societies and the theoretical difficulty in aggregating preferences, this model suggests an alternative method of explaining "optimal democratic"...