Willig (1976) argues that the change in consumer's surplus is often a good approximation to the willingness to pay for a price change: if the income elasticity of demand is small, or the price change is small, then the percentage error from using consumer's surplus is small. If the price of a...

This paper studies an internet trading mechanism similar to the one described in Peters and Severinov (2001) in a market where traders values are interdependent. It is shown that under reasonable conditions this mechanism has a perfect Bayesian equilibrium which supports allocations that...

The tax reform literature, pioneered by Guesnerie [1977], uses static models but views tax reform as a dynamic process, i.e., as a policy-maker implementing incremental reforms over time. This paper studies tax reform in a dynamic version of the Diamond-Mirrlees-Guesnerie model and focuses on a...

In this paper we investigate whether local governments react on the welfare benefit levels in neighboring jurisdictions when setting their own benefit levels. We solve the simultaneity problem arising from the welfare game by utilizing a policy intervention; more specifically, we use a centrally...

Specialist merchants and traders---agents who mediate the transfer of goods and services between producers and consumers---are central to the economic process, but there are few theoretical models in which the institution of intermediation is an endogenous part of an equilibrium. This paper...

We propose a new location model where consumers are allowed to make multiple purchases (i.e., one unit from each firm). This model fits many markets (e.g. newspapers, credit cards, scholarly journals, subscriptions to TV channels, etc.) better than existing models. A common feature of these...

This paper studies a competitive market model for trading indivisible commodities. Commodities can be desirable or undesirable. Agents' preferences depend on the bundle of commodities and the quantity of money they hold. We assume that agents have quasi-linear utilities in money. Using the...

In this paper, we study the incumbent's incentive to share its essential facility when there exist network effects. We show that without network effects, the incumbent will charge an access fee high enough to deter the entry. with network effects, however, the incumbent always has an incentive...

This paper is an attempt to decompose the average transactions velocity of money into two or more individual velocities. When the economy-wide velocity is expressed as a weighted average of two disaggregated velocities, this provides an equation with two unknowns. The additional equation can be...

This paper examines the role of monetary policy in the presence of endogenous time preference. The framework in which this issue is addressed is a monetary model with cash-in-advance constraints and an additional trading friction that is typical of the class of “liquidity models†of...