Many service industries, including the medical and legal professions in some countries, display a gated structure. Rather than approaching a final producer directly, a consumer will first seek a referral from an intermediary. Such an industry structure might help to alleviate adverse selection...

This paper proposes a tractable alternative to Cobb-Douglas utility to resolve the problems of lack of reservation price and income effects in demand functions derived from Cobb-Douglas utility or quasilinear utility. Another advantage of this alternative is that it provides a closed-form...