Economic theories of rational addiction aim to describe consumer behavior in the presence of habit-forming goods. We provide a biological foundation for this body of work by formally specifying conditions under which it is optimal to form a habit. We demonstrate the empirical validity of our...

Certain aspects of advertising–especially on television–are not easily explained with conventional economic models. In particular, much of the imagery and repetitive thematic content seen in advertisements suggests it is "psychological" in nature, as opposed to "informative". To understand...

It is often assumed (for analytical convenience, but also in accordance with common intuition) that consumer preferences are convex. In this paper, we consider circumstances under which such preferences are (or are not) optimal. In particular, we investigate a setting in which goods possess some...

The EU banana market has been of enormous interest for researchers for a long time, especially after the import policy unification brought by the Common Market Organization for Bananas (CMOB) in 1993. Empirical evidence suggests that the CMOB and its subsequent modifications have been highly...

The lack of transparency in the pricing and operational activities of state trading enterprises (STEs) has caused members of the World Trade Organization to express concern that certain countries’ STEs might circumvent Uruguay Round commitments on export subsidies, domestic support, or market...

Trade relations between the United States (U.S) and Mexico are increasingly interrelated and important ever since the ratification of NAFTA in 1994. With the advent of NAFTA, tariffs on many agricultural products were lowered or are in the process of being lowered. Mexico implements a...