Customs and institutions affect and are affected by economic relations and processes. The two-way interaction is particularly important in studying history where the scale of the temporal canvas ensures that very few variables can be treated as parametric. This paper assesses the methodology...

The evidence that the same total income can lead a household to choose different consumption vectors, depending on who brings in how much of the income, has led to an effort to replace the standard unitary model of the household with the ?collective model?, which recognizes that the husband and...

The paper puts forward a small but novel idea of how we can cut down the incidence of bribery. There are different kinds of bribes and what this paper is concerned with are bribes that people often have to give to get what they are legally entitled to. I shall call these ― “harassment...

This paper provides a new proof of the Pythagoras Theorem on right-angled triangles via two new lemmas pertaining to, respectively, isosceles triangles and right-angled triangles, which are of pedagogical value in themselves.

Significant attention has been paid to why a durable-goods producer with little or no market power would monopolize the maintenance market for its own product. This paper provides an explanation for this practice that is based on consumer switching costs and the choice of consumers between...

Ex-post opportunistic behavior, commonly present in bilateral trade relationships, is a key element of the transaction cost economics. Investment in outside options is a prime example of such opportunism and often leads to inefficiency, for example by exerting effort to search for alternative...

How does job assignment affect fairness concerns between coworkers? We experimentally examine agents’ horizontal fairness concerns in a three-person ultimatum game in which all agents are asked to complete a general knowledge quiz before being assigned to a high productivity or low...

How does group identity influence promotion decisions and what impact does it have on the performance of organizations through promotions? We provide answers based on two experiments in which we identify the effect of group identity on the employers’ preferences regarding whom to promote,...

We study welfare effects of horizontal mergers under a successive oligopoly model and find that downstream mergers can increase welfare if they reduce input prices. The lower input price shifts some input production from cost-inefficient upstream firms to cost-efficient ones. Also, the lower...

How does job assignment to positions with different surplus affect fairness concerns? We experimentally examine agents’ fairness concerns in a three-person ultimatum game in which all agents are asked to complete a general knowledge quiz before being assigned to a high-stake or low-stake...