Constantly rising expenditures for pharmaceuticals require government intervention in firms' pricing decisions. To this end, reference pricing systems are a frequently employed regulatory mechanism. This paper considers a duopoly market with vertically differentiated firms under different...

This papers studies the effects on service quality and consumer surplus of a minimum price which is fixed by a bureaucratic non-monopolistic professional association. It shows that the price set by a Niskanen-type professional assocation will maximize consumer surplus only if consumers demand...

Electronic commerce has grown extraordinarily over the years, with online auctions being extremely successful forms of trade. Those auctions come in a variety of different formats, such as the Buy-It-Now auction format on eBay, that allows sellers to post prices at which buyers can purchase a...

Forecasts of macroeconomic variables as the inflation rate serve as important guidelines for the private as well as the public sector. At least central banks that adopted an inflation targeting regime are in urgent need of high quality inflation forecasts. Accurate inflation forecasts are also...

Electronic coordination links markets at different locations that have initially been (partially) separated by transport costs. Rising competitive pressure should in turn affect incentives to differentiate products. In this paper investment decisions concerning transport cost reduction and...

We investigate the sensitivity of consumer surplus estimates to parametric assumptions on individual preference heterogeneity in a discrete choice framework. We compare results from a parametric random coefficients logit model and a recently proposed nonparametric sieve estimator. In particular,...