This paper considers a situation of two sellers of perfectly substitutable items competing in publicly announced reserve prices to induce potential bidders participation at their auction. After learning their own valuations and upon observing the reserve prices, potential bidders make a...

As a complementary to the existing studies of competitive market structure analysis, the present paper proposed a time series methodology to provide a more detailed picture of marketing competition in relation to competitive market structure. Two major hypotheses were tested as part of this...

Following the separation of powers' models, this paper analyzes the behaviour of the Supreme Court in the Social Security's case Rolon Zappa (1986). Besides judicial independence, I suppose that the economic, social and legal conditions of the case influence the utility of the judges. I develop...

Development depends on saving. But what exactly is saving, and how is it measured? This paper defines saving and describes several measures of financial savings. The measures account for the passage of time and for the three stages of saving: putting in (depositing), keeping in (maintaining a...

This paper investigates how estimates of the extent and trend of income poverty in China between 1990 and 2001 vary as a result of alternative plausible assumptions concerning key parameters that influence the poverty line and estimated consumption levels. Our methodology focuses on the...

Economic theories of rational addiction aim to describe consumer behavior in the presence of habit-forming goods. We provide a biological foundation for this body of work by formally specifying conditions under which it is optimal to form a habit. We demonstrate the empirical validity of our...

Since early 1994, there have been signs of an upturn in economic activity . The strength and scope of the recovery depend to a large extent on the ability of companies to exploit their competitiveness, which is dependent on the decisions they take today, particularly where both tangible and...

The Web portals business model has spread rapidly over the last few years. Despite this, there have been very few scholarly findings about which services and characteristics make a Web site a portal and which dimensions determine the customers’ evaluation of the portal’s quality. Taking the...

This paper introduces a psychological notion of categorization into economics and derives its implications for economic decision making. We show, using a tractable model of social cognition, that a decision maker in (efficiently) assigning past experiences to categories, will sort experiences of...

Resumo: Se o tempo for uma variável contínua, a comparação dos resultados decorrentes da aplicação dos modelos básicos de duopólio permite concluir que um comportamento à Cournot é mais vantajoso para as empresas do que, alternativamente, uma delas optar por assumir a liderança do...