This paper highlights the importance of "centrality" for pricing. Firms characterised by a more central position in a spatial network are more powerful in terms of having a stronger impact on their competitors' prices and on equilibrium prices. These propositions are derived from a simple...

Gross value added grew at a slow rate everywhere in Austria, due to the fact that exports, the traditional drivers of growth, failed as propellant. The brightening of national and international prospects in the second half of the year helped industrial regions, gaining them a slight growth edge...

After two years of highly dynamic growth in Austria, the global slowdown impacted in 2012 when Austria's economy managed just a relatively minor increase of its real GDP (+0.8 percent). With a few exceptions, all the economic sectors reported value-added growth rates lower than those of the...

The present paper investigates the free-riding problem in determining product quality within cooperatives in a vertically related market. Whereas the individual member has to bear all costs associated with higher quality, the benefits of delivering higher quality have to be shared among all...

Cooperatives and investor-owned firms are alternative forms of business organisation that coexist and compete in many markets. The theoretical literature has identified a number of comparative advantages and disadvantages of cooperatives. Decentralized decision making within cooperatives may...

We investigate the impact of decentralised decision making on product quality. Comparing a cooperative (decentralized decision making) and a firm (centralized decision making) suggests that members of the cooperative have an incentive to produce too much and to free-ride on quality. Free-riding...

We investigate the impact of decentralised decision-making on product quality. Comparing a cooperative and an investor-owned firm suggests that members of the cooperative have an incentive to produce too much and to free-ride on quality. Whether or not cooperatives deliver higher quality...

We investigate the impact of local market power and ‘spatial clustering’ on prices in the retail gasoline market. The acquisition of Aral stations from BP in the Austrian gasoline market in 2003 provides a ‘quasi-experiment’ for identification of the causal effects of changes in spatial...

This paper analyzes the role of ethnic networks in the location decision of migrants to the EU at the regional level. Using a random parameters logit specification we find a substantially positive effect of ethnic networks on the location decision of migrants. Furthermore, we find evidence of...