Although states maintain an active, continually expanding portfolio of tax incentives, technological assistance, subsidized loans, tax exempt bonds, and direct loans to pursue economic development, the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of these efforts have not been clearly established....

Fair trade, also known as resale price maintenance (RPM), is a per se violation of the antitrust laws. Economic theory suggests that RPM may enhance the efficiency of distribution, but opposition to the practice remains strong. This opposition may stem from concern that RPM raises retail prices...

When suppliers produce products for which demand is uncertain, they face a problem of inducing downstream distributors to stock inventory levels that the suppliers prefer. This paper considers a wide array of alternative supply contracts, each of which consists of a mixture of constant per-unit...

Retailers face powerful incentives to limit the inventories they stock, and this leads them to focus on inventory turn as a performance measure. Their desire to pare inventory holding costs yields a misalignment of their incentives with those of a supplier seeking to have a broad line of...

We develop an infinite-horizon, overlapping-generations model of reputation in which consumers base willingness to pay for agent services on past performance summarized by a trademark. We show that when trademarks can be sold, successful firms capture the full value of their reputations upon...

This paper offers a new theory of destructive competition. We compare minimum resale price maintenance (RPM) to retail market clearing in a model with a monopolistic manufacturer selling to competitive retailers. In both the RPM and Flexible-Pricing Games, retailers must order inventories before...

Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) is federally financed but state administered. States vary widely both in benefit application rates and the rates at which applications are denied. Since the decision to apply depends on the likelihood of qualifying for benefits and since denial rates are...