Antitrust enforcement makes it difficult to test theories of cartel formation because most attempts to form cartels are blocked. However, federal laws allow U.S. produce growers to operate marketing cartels through devices called marketing orders. These cartels use quantity controls and quality...

Brilliant but little known, in part because his style was dense and crucial papers unpublished, Earl Thompson reformulated standard theory to achieve policy relevance, focusing on significant rent-seeking inefficiencies stemming from private information and transaction costs. Drawing on history,...

Attiat Ott and Richard Cebula have recognised the need to present, in an accessible and straightforward way, the voluminous literature in the public economics arena. Advances in econometric techniques and the spillover of knowledge from other disciplines made it difficult, not only for students...

Buchanan's contributions through 1984 are surveyed in six areas: (A) debt, fiscal illusion, and Keynesian criticisms, (B) London School of Economics cost approach, (C) methodological individualism and the economics of politics, (D) welfare price theory, (E) rent-seeking and polity failure, and...

We introduce a computational model of the evolution of a value-maximizing research-based pharmaceutical firm and parameterize it using estimates of R&D costs, profit distributions, and candidate attrition rates. We use the model to estimate how the probability of surviving and covering the costs...

Which strategies generate value in e-commerce environments? In a step towards answering this question, this paper estimates the impacts of several competitive strategies on the values of the well-known Internet retailer Amazon.com and three of its early competitors, BarnesandNoble.com, CDNOW,...