We analyze the empirical relationship between journal prices, their quality measured by their citation counts, their age, as well as conduct of publishers. The database covers 22 scientific fields and over 2600 among the most highly reputed and cited journals in 2003. We show that (a) for-profit...

Pianists who achieve high scores in the Queen Elizabeth musical competition are rewarded by subsequent success. This is not surprising in itself, but it is not immediately clear whether this is caused by the score or because those who have high scores are better pianists. Data on eleven...

We discuss the welfare effects of bundling two products offered by two symmetric firms. We first show that, in terms of welfare, a monopoly does better than a duopoly in which each firm sell its good and that a monopoly selling the bundle does better than if it sells the bundle and the two goods...

We analyze the welfare consequences of an increase in the commissions charged by intermediaries in auction markets. We argue that while commissions are similar to taxes imposed on buyers and sellers the question of incidence deserves a new treatment in auction markets. We show that an increase...

The debate about whether the arts should be supported or not is far from being recent, and most governments support the arts in one way or the other. The literature considers several arguments in favor of such interventions. Education may seem as an action which could, in the long run, lead to...

The anomaly is concerned with the observation that in multiple-item auctions of identical ob- jects, prices tend to decline over time. We show that in the case of wine auctions which have been analyzed frequently, the anomaly is likely to be caused by the the fact that most bids are entered by...

We analyze the voting behavior and ratings of judges in a popular song contest held every year in Europe. The dataset makes it possible to analyze the determinants of success, and gives a rare opportunity to run a direct test of vote trading, or logrolling. Though the votes cast may appear as...

Winemaking is a highly complex technology. It needs inputs over which there is no control (good weather conditions), initial endowments which can hardly be modified (soil, exposure of the slopes), inputs which take 20 to 30 years before producing good quality outputs (vines), manual operations...

We discuss a subscription game in which service providers (e.g., museums)team up in offering a limited time subscription or access pass allowing unlimited usage of their services. In this game, a natural way to allocate the subscription income among the service providers is by using the Shapley...

We show how the general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets can be represented by a welfare program and we use this program to prove several well-known results. The approach is general in the sense that it uses a nonlinear specification for returns on assets and does not require...