The incremental innovations that underly much of modern economic growth typically involve changes to one or more components of a complex product. This creates a tension. On the one hand, a principal would like an agent to contribute innovative components. On the other hand, ironing out...

We examine a model of dynamic screening and price discrimination in which the seller has limited commitment power. Two cohorts of anonymous, patient, and risk-neutral buyers arrive over two periods. Buyers in the first cohort arrive in period one, are privately informed about the distribution of...

We propose a model of delegated asset management in which individual investors are more informed about the domestic market than the foreign market and face uncertainty about quality of portfolio managers. The model shows that asymmetric information of individual investors results in home bias...

In a dynamic model of financial market trading multiple heterogeneously informed traders choose when to place orders. Better informed traders trade immediately, worse informed delay — even though they expect the public expectation to move against them. This behavior causes distinct intra-day...

When does it pay a coalition of buyers and a coalition of sellers to by-pass a noncooperative market outcome by negotiating an alternative contract? Should these collective contracts be allowed? This paper investigates one source of the incentive for collective contracting: the failure of...

This paper examines puzzling behavior in industries in which one firm is able to obtain a price premium and/or a dominant market share for a product which is identical to that of its rivals. It is shown that when there is learning by doing, economies of scale, network externalities, or...

This paper investigates the consequences of imperfect and uneven factor market development for farm efficiency in rural China. In particular, we estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative (instead of market) allocation of...

This study of the Italian wool-based textile industries (woollens, worsteds, and serges) seeks to examine its rise, expansion, and ultimate decline, over a period of five centuries (from ca. 1200 to ca. 1730) in the context of both international competition and economic conjoncture, in the...

This (revised) study seeks to examine the rise, expansion, and ultimate decline of the Italian wool-based textile industries over a period of six centuries (from ca. 1100 to ca. 1730). An international trade model combining transaction costs and comparative advantage is employed to explain the...

During the hundred-year period from about 1320 to about 1420, the Florentine woollen cloth industry underwent two closely connected crises. The first crisis was the consequence, direct and indirect, of the ravages of warfare and falling population, afflicting the entire Mediterranean basin and...