Many emerging or transition economies lack institutional arrangements (like ISO certification) to credibly signal product quality. The absence of such institutions leads to low levels of market activity with poor quality products on sale. In this paper, we use a dynamic framework with asymmetric...

It has been documented that retail gasoline prices respond more quickly to increases in wholesale price than to decreases. However, there is very little theoretical or empirical evidence identifying the market characteristics responsible for this behavior. This paper presents a new theoretical...

We report evidence of three types of consumer switching decision errors within the UK electricity market. We identify consumers who do not switch despite substantial available savings, consumers who switch from a cheaper to a more expensive supplier and consumers who switch to a cheaper, but not...

The paper analyzes voluntary Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) organization of work. The empirical setting considered is the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The paper finds that the production process is hierarchical notwithstanding the modular (nearly decomposable) architecture of...

This paper presents the stylized facts of open source software innovation and provides empirical evidence on the impact of increased competition by OSS on the innovative activity in the software industry. Furthermore, we introduce a simple formal model that captures the innovation impact of OSS...

With the enlargement of the European Union, many Central and Eastern European (CEE) manufacturing companies have greater opportunity for internationalizing their activities. Although it is generally held that SMEs have the flexibility and ability to adapt to their environment more quickly than...

The hypothesis that the behavior of firms in adjusting the number of their employees along a business cycle depends on the size of the firms has often been mentioned in the literature. Several authors argue that small and medium sized enterprises are more hesitant in hiring additional employees...

We discuss the case of a monopolist of a base good in the presence of complementary goods provided either by it or by other firms. We assess and calibrate the extent of the influence on the profits from the base good that is created by the existence of complementary goods, i.e., the extent of...

This paper argues that advertising should be regarded as a transaction between a consumer and a firm that potentially generates a mutual benefit. We develop that there exists a problem of adverse selection, however, which makes it impossible to establish direct markets for advertising. The media...

Previous literature has mostly considered R&D and licensing activities separately. In this paper we examine the effect of licensing on R&D and social welfare. We show that the effect of licensing on the incentive for doing R&D is ambiguous and depends on the costs of doing R&D. We also show that...