Using a representative sample of actual payments made by adult U.S. consumers, this article analyzes the composition of payment methods consumers use to pay for goods and services. Consumer spending is divided into 21 main merchant categories. Results show the distributions of electronic, card,...

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...

This book provides a comprehensive review of the prospects for financial markets in the face of rapid technological development and international integration. It offers a revolutionary perspective, exploring the challenges for regulators and demonstrating a network economics approach to explain...

We analyze competition for experienced workers among wage-setting firms. The firms can design poaching offers with higher wages to workers who switch from rivals relative to wages paid to their own existing employees. We evaluate the profit and welfare effects of anti-poaching agreements that...

Real wages in U.S. retail sectors exhibit years of stickiness around minimum wage, where only recently retailers have started raising wages. The paper provides a theoretical explanation for this long-term wage stickiness by exploring the possibility that firms may tacitly collude on paying the...

Owners of general purpose reloadable prepaid cards (GPR) who do not have checking accounts comprise 4.8 percent of U.S. adults, according to the 2012 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice. This report explores two important aspects of prepaid card use: Do owners of GPR prepaid cards who lack...

Alternating-offers bargaining procedures generate two types of surplus: (i) shares of the pie that is divided according to the assumed bargaining mechanism, and (ii) surpluses that are generated by the first-mover advantage. Most existing literature focuses on the first surplus but ignores the...

For more than three decades, average college tuition in the United State has risen at rates far in excess of inflation. This article constructs a simple analytical model to analyze how competing colleges adjust their tuition and enrollment levels when student loans become more affordable....

This short paper demonstrates that the equilibrium payoffs of an alternating-offers bargaining game over a unit of surplus converge to equal division provided that the parties are allowed to bargain over all the surpluses generated by the "right" to be the first to make offers. The result...