This report provides a conceptual foundation for the analysis of international regulatory co-operation (IRC) and its potential benefits through reduced trade costs. Different forms of IRC aiming to reduce specification, conformity assessment and information costs - which can arise from...

I analyze a monopolistic model of quality uncertainty but with the possibility of information acquisition on the consumer side. Information is costly and its amount is chosen by the consumer. The analysis of Bayesian equilibria shows the possibility of three equilibrium classes, only one of...

A number of countries used discriminatory government procurement policies as part of stimulus packages designed to alleviate the effects of the global economic crisis. This paper collates and updates the evidence related to the size of procurement markets, the level of home bias they exhibit,...

We study a continuous-time problem of optimal public good contribution under uncertainty for an economy with a finite number of agents. Each agent can allocate his wealth between private consumption and repeated but irreversible contributions to increase the stock of some public good. We study...

We use an experiment to explore how subjects learn to play against computers which are programmed to follow one of a number of standard learning algorithms. The learning theories are (unbeknown to subjects) a best response process, fictitious play, imitation, reinforcement learning, and a trial...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation and subject it to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysis we find that the different predictions of previous imitation models are due to different informational assumptions, not to different behavioral rules....

IPTS recently acquired a consumer internet clickstream database containing the full set of annual (2011) clickstream records for about 25.000 internet users in the five largest EU economies (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain). It contains time spend on each webpage and socio-economic...

We study a market with entrepreneurial and workers entry where both entrepreneurs' abilities and workers' qualities are private information. We develop an Agent-Based Computable model to mimic the mechanisms described in a previous analytical model (Boadway and Sato 2011). Then, we introduce the...

This paper assesses whether European firms' innovative performance is impacted by investments in training directly aimed at developing and/or introducing innovation, in addition to the scale of a firm's investments in innovation proxied by the number of R&D personnels. In particular, it explores...

It is challenging to explain the collapse in the price of subprime mortgage-backed securities (MBS) during the Financial Crisis of 2008, using the existing models of fire-sale. I present amodel to demonstrate that fire-sales may happen evenwhen there is a relatively sizable pool of natural...