This paper models payment evasion as a source of profit by letting the firm choose the price charged to paying consumers and the fine collected from detected payment evaders. The consumers choose whether to purchase, evade payment, or refrain from consumption. We show that payment evasion allows...

This paper provides a theoretical rationale for non-binding retail price recommendations (RPRs) in vertical supply relations. Analyzing a bilateral manufacturer-retailer relationship with repeated trade, we show that linear relational contracts can implement the surplusmaximizing outcome. If the...

This paper studies content strategies for online publishers of digital information goods. It examines sampling strategies and compares their performance to paid content and free content strategies. A sampling strategy, where some of the content is offered for free and consumers are charged for...

Managers like to think well of themselves, and of the firms that employ them. However, positive illusions can bias a manager's evaluation of market outcomes, self-servingly crediting success on the superior quality of one's own product but blaming failure on the aggressive price of a...

This paper models payment evasion as a source of profit by letting the firm choose the price charged to paying consumers and the fine collected from detected payment evaders. The consumers choose whether to purchase, evade payment, or refrain from consumption. The authors show that payment...

This paper examines the effects of introducing competition into monopolized network industries on prices and infrastructure quality. Analyzing a model with reduced-form demand, we first show that deregulating an integrated monopoly cannot simultaneously decrease the retail price and increase...

We analyze the factors that influence the support for environmental policy proposals. Swiss referendum data show that proposals obtain more yes-votes if they do not restrict consumption possibilities directly, if they are endorsed by the largest business association, if environmental preferences...

Are initial competitive advantages self-reinforcing, so that markets exhibit an endogenous tendency to be dominated by only a few firms? Although this question is of great economic importance, no systematic empirical study has yet addressed it. Therefore, we examine experimentally whether firms...

This paper investigates the merger wave hypothesis for the US and the UK employing a Markov regime-switching model. Using quarterly data covering the last 30 years, for the US, we identify the beginning of a merger wave in the mid 1990s but not the much-discussed 1980s merger wave. We argue...

This paper provides a formal analysis of persuasive advertising when firms compete for consumers with heterogenous social attitudes towards the consumption by others. Deriving product demand from primitives, we show that the demand-enhancing effect of persuasive advertising varies across...