Critics of capitalism contend that many products are designed to have uneconomically short lives, with the intention of forcing consumers to repurchase too frequently. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as 'planned obsolescence.'In this paper, the authors show that a competitive market may...

For many years IO economists devoted attention to the size distributions’ of firms in a given industry. Most studies showed that the size distribution of firms in oligopolistic markets is highly skewed. There are many small firms and a few large firms. There is also a consensus that relative...

I develop a dynamic asymmetric information model where a domestic producer is unable to commit to producing a high-quality product. The domestic producer then can signal to consumers that it is producing a high-quality product by developing the infrastructure needed to start exporting the...

This paper investigates industry-wide agreements on joint refund policies, and how they influence price competition. We compute the profit of fully-colluding, competing, and semicolluding service providers who offer refunds to those consumers who do not show up at the time of service. Our main...

What services do bank depositors seek? Oz Shy and Rune Stenbacka argue that they often seek money storage and payment services, but they get much more than they bargain for.