Antitrust enforcement makes it difficult to test theories of cartel formation because most attempts to form cartels are blocked. However, federal laws allow U.S. produce growers to operate marketing cartels through devices called marketing orders. These cartels use quantity controls and quality...

We examine conditions under which group consumption is likely to involve informal and tacit reciprocity agreements rather than formal contracts and the price system. Our model shows that informal reciprocity agreements are more likely to be used when transaction costs of formal agreements are...

From at least 1893 economists have viewed income as an important determinant of government size and the hypothesis that government size increases with income is now enshrined in the literature as Wagner's Law. More recently, however, public choice economists and growth theorists have tended to...

We use a simple model of collaborative innovation to structure an empirical analysis of minority equity links in biotechnology alliances between clients and R&D firms. In the model, an equity link is an investment in information acquisition: it improves the ability of the client to learn about...

This paper uses a stationary multivariate asymmetric GARCH specification of the international capital asset pricing model to investigate contagion effects across six developed and emerging East Asian markets as well as the US and the World markets around the time of the Asian currency crisis of...

This paper provides theoretical explanations for devices that movie distributors use to avoid head-to-head competition. We use a simple static model to show how revenuse sharing exhibition contracts providex multiplex owners with incentives to take cross effects on demand into account. Then we...

As a first step towards understanding the evolution of small groups in firms, this paper develops and tests a simple decision-theoretical model of research-unit evolution in which, as managers resolve their uncertainty over time, they shut down under-performing units and remove under-performing...

Filson (2001) uses industry-level data on firm numbers, price, quantity, and quality along with an equilibrium model of industry evolution to estimate the nature and effects of quality and cost improvement in the personal computer industry and four other new industries. This paper studies the...

The current literature on sharing contracts emphasizes the importance of asymmetric information and typically assumes that one party is risk neutral while the other is risk averse. This paper describes a real-world contract that is widely used - the movie exhibition contract - and argues that...