This dissertation includes three essays that consider the role of quality variation within agricultural production when consumers are heterogeneous in their preferences for quality. The first essay, 'The Welfare Benefits of USDA Beef Quality Certification Programs,' estimates the consumer...

The Medicare program, which provides insurance coverage to the elderly in the United States, does not protect them fully against high out-of-pocket costs. For this reason private supplementary insurance, named Medigap, has been available to cover Medicare gaps. This paper studies how Medigap...

The clear definition of property rights is not a sufficient condition to prevent congestion effects in commons. In this paper we present how interesting can be the coordination among owners in the preservation of the common good. Our approach takes into account economic dynamics and incentive...

In the presence of informational frictions and uncertainty, an investment model is developed to capture the asymmetric dynamics of business cycles. When affected by a negative shock, the economy responds differently than when hit by a positive shock, both in terms of size and recovery length. In...

Compared with the traditional public-finance approach of a monolithic fully informed planner, earmarking of taxation is less likely to be optimal if a principal-agent setting is considered, where taxing and spending are performed by two separate agents which are monitored by the parliament. We...

This paper examines one of the most important marketing strategies by software producers on the Internet. That is whether to offer free samples and if so, whether to list the samples on shareware repositories. I show that firms with higher value products have a greater incentive to offer free...

The main aim of this paper is to capture the elements of individual information frames and their relations using semantic network; and to express the loss of information and information asymmetry in the market environment. Preferences of elements in the network are evaluated by the Analytical...

Corporate self-regulation is a crucial non-market strategy, and has generally been understood as a response to regulatory threats. However, self-regulation can also influence the nature of regulatory threats, especially when firms have private information about their costs of abatement. We study...

We consider a principal agent problem in a decentralized organization. The agent holds private information with respect to an uncertain demand within a single selling season. As such his task is to determine the optimal order quantity. Being head of a profit center, however, he naturally focuses...

In this paper, we consider a model that suggests that the theory of exchange with asymmetric information seems suitable to provide a possible explanation model of occurrence and duration of civil wars. We show that although civil conflicts are not Pareto optimal ex post they may be Pareto...