We empirically study the effectiveness of a Demand Side Management (DSM) program for households based on customer information.

In this paper, we relate the differential development of market and planning systems to the creation and destruction of contacts. In our general equilibrium model, a greater stock of relational capital (business contacts) increases the sold output of a representative firm. Besides this direct...

This paper links two concepts of social capital to economic development. Social Capital (SC) appears in the litrature, on the individual level, as the number contacts of an agent has and his ability to raise contacts and, on the community level, as norms that help a society to function. In our...

This article analyzes the market for credit cards. I begin with a discussion of the organization and the characteristics of the market. Next I present the antitrust cases in the USA and the European Union. Contributions to the literature on credit cards in respect to the market characteristics...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. this option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

I study the robustness of Rubinstein´s (1989) E-Mail Game results towards rough inductive reasoning. Rough induction is a form of boundedly rational reasoning where a player does not carry out every inductive step. The information structure in the E-Mail game is generalized and the conditions...

Old elites can block changes, but not all do. Why is it that stronger elites may allow more changes than weaker elites? Why do economies with larger stocks of natural resources not grow faster than economies poorer in natural resources? We argue that old elites hold some power to extract rents...

This article studies the consequences of price discrimination in a market for experts´services. In the case of experts markets, where the expert observers the intervention that a consumer needs to fix his problem and also provides a treatment, price discrimination proceeds along the dimension...

We study all-pay auctions with budget-constrained bidders who have access to fair insurance before bidding simultaneously over a prize. We characterize a unique equilibrium for the special cases of two bidders and one prize, show existence and a heuristic for finding an equilibrium in the case...

This paper provides an analytical framework to capture the economic importance of social capital for growth and innovation. Relational Capital (RC) consists of contacts between economic necessary to acquire inputs and to sell outputs units. These contacts form the individual aspect of social...