Incumbent firms may acquire start-ups to eliminate potential competition without intending to develop new technology (killer acquisitions). We develop a model to examine the incentives and welfare implications of killer acquisitions under different market structures: vertical separation and...

We study incentives for innovations that enable firms to enter backward into the input market. Such innovations are disruptive in that they lead to structural changes and even reversal of supply-customer relationships. We first show that Arrow's replacement effect is also present in our vertical...

We study the effect of product liability on the incentives of product and safety innovation. We first develop a monopoly model in which a firm chooses both product novelty and safety in an innovation stage followed by a production stage. A greater product liability directly increases the...

This dissertation consists of three chapters.Chapter 1 presents an axiomatization of expected utility from the frequentist perspective. It starts with a preference relation on the set of infinite sequences with limit relative frequencies. We consider three axioms parallel to the ones for the...

Chapter 1 considers a stochastic overlapping generations model in which, at each date, a distributional shock divides the constant total endowment between a young and an old agents. Commitment cannot be externally enforced. More precisely, at each date, the young and old agents simultaneously...