The authors examine the incentives which competing principals give their agents, focusing on two oligopoly models where owners write incentive contracts with the ir managers. Under Cournot quantity competition, each manager's margi nal payment for production will exceed the firm's marginal...

Search theory has been extensively and successfully applied to explain the persistence of price dispersion. This paper presents an explicitly dynamic search model that is able to account for cyclical patterns of prices and demand over time. These cyclical features of the model are the...

We estimate an insurer-specific preference function which rationalizes hospital referrals for privately insured births in California. The function is additively separable in: a hospital price paid by the insurer, the distance traveled, and plan- and severity-specific hospital fixed effects...

Commercial health insurers in California use provider capitation payments to different extents. These are similar to arrangements introduced by the recent health reforms to give physicians incentives to control costs. In a previous paper we showed that patients whose insurers used capitation...

The authors evaluate the voluntary export restraint that was initially placed on exports of automobiles from Japan in 1981. They evaluate the impact this policy had on U.S. consumer welfare, firm profits, and foregone tariff revenue from its initiation through 1990.

This paper compares hedonic to matched model indexes. Matched model indexes are averages of the price changes of goods that remain on sampled stores' shelves. Since goods that disappear tend to have falling market values, matched model indexes select from the right tail of price changes. The BLS...

The CPI component indices are obtained from comparing price quotes at a given store in different periods. If we omit comparisons from goods in the store in the initial, but not in the comparison, period we generate a selection bias: goods that exit are disproportionately obsolete goods that have...