We analyze competition between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) where consumers demand heterogeneous content within two Quality-of-Service (QoS) regimes, Net Neutrality and Paid Prioritization, and show that paid prioritization increases the static efficiency compared to a neutral network. We...

This paper provides a novel rationale for the regulation of market size when heterogeneous firms compete. A regulator seeks to maximize total welfare by choosing the number of firms allowed to enter the market, e.g. by issuing a certain number of licenses. Opening up the market for more firms...

The common prior assumption asserts that the beliefs of agents in different states of theworld are their posteriors based on a common prior and possibly some private signal. Commonpriors are pervasive in most economic models of incomplete information, oligopoly models withasymmetrically informed...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation andsubject it to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysiswe …nd that the different predictions of previous imitation models aredue to different informational assumptions, not to different behavioralrules. It is...

We conduct a series of Cournot duopoly market experiments with a high number of repetitions and fixed matching. Our treatments include markets with (a) complete cost symmetry and complete information, (b) slight cost asymmetry and complete information, and (c) varying cost asymmetries and...

The paper seeks to analyze the distribution of real estate assets among Brazilian families and Imposto Predial e Territorial Urbano (IPTU) - property tax - their main form of taxation. The text points out that real estate property usufruct is more concentrated than family income itself, despite...

Private politics are often introduced by market participants in the absence of public regulation. But when is private politics enough, efficient, or better than administratively costly public regulation? We present a novel framework in which we can study the interaction between regulation,...

Diermeier and Fong (2008a) recently proposed a legislative bargaining model with reconsideration in the context of a distributive policy environment. In this paper we prove general existence and necessary conditions for pure-strategy stationary equilibria for any finite policy space and...

Common wisdom suggests that entry reduces profits of the incumbentfirms. On the contrary, we show that if the incumbents differ in marginal costs and theentrants behave like Stackelberg followers, entry may benefit the incumbents who arerelatively cost efficient while it always hurts the cost...

This paper examines the validity of alternative assumptions aboutpublic enterprise strategies in the presence of both domestic and internationalcompetition. It extends the quantity-setting game to apreplay stage and endogenizes the firms’ order of moves to show thati) Cournot competition is...