Setting a price that results in rationing may be optimal for a seller whose customers must make a specific investment to be able to use its product. Rationing results in ex-post inefficiency, but the resulting distribution of ex-post surplus can compensate consumers for their...

Mittlerweile sind nahezu alle Branchen lueckenlos durch elektronische Marktplaetze abgedeckt mit der Folge eines fast ausschließlichen Verdraengungswettbewerbs. Der ueberwiegende Teil der Marktplaetze hat das Problem des Erreichens der kritischen Masse zur Realisierung von Netzeffekten geloest....

This paper attempts to define financial globalization as a process whereby financial markets internationally are integrated so closely that they can be considered as a single market. The process, viewed as a by- product of financial liberalization, is only a necessary condition for financial...

Painkilling drugs produce a good called relief which reduces the fixed level of bad (pain) the individual is endowed with. These drugs have the side-effect of reducing the utility the individual gets from consuming goods. This means that the shadow price of relief counts not only the cost of...

A bidding strategy commonly observed in Internet auctions, though not frequently in live auctions, is that of "jump-bidding," or entering a bid larger than necessary to be a current high bidder. In this paper, we argue that the cost associated with entering on-line bids and the uncertainty...

In this paper we estimate the intrahousehold distribution of household's private expenditures between men and women (the sharing rule) in two types of Spanish households: those in which the woman works and those in which the woman does not work. The results for working women are parallel to...

The traditional approach for assessing farm sustainability (based on indicators of “productivity”, “profitability”, and “financial dependency”) fails to explain why there exist highly sustainable farms with different levels of “efficiency” such as low productive subsistent and...

This paper presents a search model of centralized and decentralized trade. In a centralized market, trades are intermediated by market makers at publicly posted bid-ask prices. In a decentralized market, traders search counterparties. Prices are negotiated and transactions are conducted in...

We have found several propositions in the economics of information which depend on the log of the cumulative distribution distribution of a random variable being a concave function. In this paper we present several theorems and applications of the property of log-concavity.

In January 2003, the Government asked the Commission to undertake a study into the Mutual Recognition Agreement (MRA) and Trans-Tasm an Mutual Recognition Arrangement (TTMRA).