Many comparisons of the performance of public and private producers use a public/private ownership dummy varaible to capture cost differences in cross section data. This is appropriate if the producer choice is random. The dummy variable model is, however, logically inconsistent if the producer...

Information Technologies (IT) induce many innovations in service industries. Innovations in IT highlight the peculiarities of innovation in service industries compared to manufactured-goods industries. Because innovations often affect competitiveness, service-providers attach a high importance...

This paper tries to find an economic explanation to the fact that vaccines for death-causing diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tubersulosis, have not been discovered yet.

This paper follows recent research about the importance, the variety and the development of innovation in the service industries. We study the innovations which have appeared in the fast growing activity of mobile telecommunication services in France.

Firms sometimes try to "poach" the current customers of their competitors by offering them special inducements to switch. The authors analyze duopoly poaching under both short-term and long-term contracts in two polar cases: either each consumer's brand preferences are constant from one period...

This paper shows that, indeed , Aumann's classical existence and equivalence theorems depend on there being many more agents than commodities. We show that for an arbitrary atomless measure space of agents three is a fixed non-separable infinite dimensional commodity space in which one can...

Extrinsic uncertainty is effective at a competitive equilibrium. This is generic if spot markets are inoperative: the only objects of exchange are assets for the contingent delivery of commodities; and the asset market is incomplete. The structure of payoffs of assets may allow for non-trivial...

This paper discusses the problems involved in considering competition policy as a separate area of economic policy. Two problems are given special attention. The first is the doubtful efficiency gain from enforcing competitive conditions in one industry when other industries are not operating at...