The Italian cultural industry is now marching on an innovative supply chain, whose main pattern consists in a new utility perception and consumption behaviours on the demand side and a strong vocation to invest in communication and public relations on the supply side. The content of this paper...

In November 2001, a TV program showed that many large Dutch construction companies participated in price fixing. We analyze how one such company, Heijmans, reacted to the reputation crises after the TV program by introducing a code of conduct. We present the outcomes of a questionnaire survey...

Corporations discover that social responsibility pays off. However, sometimes doing what is ethical will prove costly to a company. The purpose of this article is to clarify this trade-off by developing an economic model that describes the choice between profits and principles. The model is used...

According to several psychological and economic studies, non-binding communication can be an effective tool to increase trust and enhance cooperation. This paper focuses on reasons why people stick to a given promise and analyzes to what extent image concerns of being perceived as a promise...

The aim of this paper is to interpret the relationships between information networks and the civil wars (Colombia). Over a period of paramilitary violence networks of informants were used with a strategic purpose. In fact, the paramilitaries were preparing each slaughter counting information...

This paper studies how cartel stability is influenced by asymmetric information and communication about demand. Firms in a cartel face fluctuating demand in a repeated game framework. In each period, one randomly chosen firm knows current demand. In this context we consider two different...

We model a game similar to the interaction between an academic advisor and advisee. Like the classic cheap talk setup, an informed player sends information to an uninformed receiver who is to take an action which affects the payoffs of both sender and receiver. However, unlike the classic cheap...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004This paper provides an analytical framework for studying principal-agent problems with adverse selection and limited commitment. By allowing the principal to use noisy communication we solve two fundamental problems of...

This paper derives conditions under which reputation enables certifiers to resist capture. These conditions alone have strong implications for the industrial organization of certification markets: 1) Honest certification requires high prices that may even exceed the static monopoly price. 2)...

Language is an imperfect and uneven means of communicating information about a complex and nuanced world. We run an experimental investigation of a setting in which the messages available to the sender imperfectly describe the state of the world, however the sender can improve communication, at...