This paper examines how delivery tariffs and private quality standards are determined in vertical relations that are subject to asymmetric information. We consider an infinitely repeated game where an upstream firm sells a product to a downstream firm. In each period, the firms negotiate a...

One striking development associated with the explosion of e-commerce is the increased transparency of sellers' quality history. In this paper we analyze how this affects firms' incentives to invest in quality when the outcome of investment is uncertain. We identify two conflicting effects. On...

This paper proposes a model of attention allocation in decision-making. Attention has various definitions across the literature. Here, I understand attention as selecting information for costly processing. The paper investigates how an agent rationally allocates attention. The resulting...

This paper studies the interaction between two dynamic domains, (1) an evolutionary biological system ('the environment') whose behaviour determines the availability of a resource stock, and (2) an industry where access to the resource stock is determined by the outcome of a patent race. The...

We consider an oligopolistic market where firms compete in price and quality and where consumers are heterogeneous in knowledge: some consumers know both the prices and quality of the products offered, some know only the prices and some know neither. We show that two types of signalling...

Firms often face choices about when to upgrade and what to upgrade to. We discuss this in the context of upgrading to a new technology (for example, a new computer system), but it applies equally to the upgrading of processes (for example, a new organizational structure) or to individual choices...

In this paper we extend the model of vertical product differentiation to also consider information disparities about the extent of quality differences. Equilibrium prices turn out to depend not only on the share of informed consumers but also on uninformed consumers beliefs about quality...

Es wird ein liberaler Ansatz zum Umgang mit der aktuellen Corona-Pandemie vorgestellt, der mehr auf individuellen Entscheidungen und Eigenverantwortung setzt als auf staatliche Vorgaben und Zwang, die weder besonders effektiv noch effizient sind. Die Anwendung dieses Ansatzes wird für...

The analysis of climate change is confronted with large uncertainties that need to be taken into account to arrive at meaningful policy recommendations. The main contribution of economics to this interdisciplinary task is to provide formal frameworks and techniques for analyzing climate policy...

Adding a stage of signal acquisition to the expected utility model shows that Bayesian updating results in a well defined law of demand for financial information when asset return distributions are conjugate priors to signals such as in the gamma-Poisson case. Signals have a positive marginal...