An objective ranking of economics departments worldwide in terms of graduate education is derived. The central idea is that the value of a department is the sum of the values of its PhD graduates, as reflected in the values of their current employing departments. The scores are thus derived as...

This paper is an attempt to develop a unified approach to endogenous heterogeneity by constructing general class of two-player symmetric games that always possess only asymmetric pure-strategy Nash equilibria. These classes of games are characterized in some abstract sense by two general...

We investigate the effects of market transparency on prices in the Bertrand duopoly model for both the cases of strategic complementarities and strategic substitutes. For the former class of games “conventional wisdom” concerning prices is confirmed, since they decrease. The consumers are...

Duopoly firms engaged in a standard two-stage game of R&D and Cournot competition are caught in a prisoner's dilemma for their R&D decisions whenever spillover effects are low. This effect works to the advantage of consumers and society. This result provides an interesting perspective on the...

In this note, we start to claim that established marriages can be heavily destabilized when the population of existing couples is enriched by the arrival of new candidates to marriage. Afterwards, we discuss briefly how stability concepts can be extended to account for entry and exit phenomena...

We investigate the effects of forward looking behavior in technology adoption. The setup is an overlapping generation model where agents choose between two alternative networks taking in consideration both the installed base and the expected base. The latter element is the distinctive feature of...

We obtain explicitly the optimal path of prices for a monopolist operating in a network industry during a finite number of periods. We describe this optimal path as a function of network intensity and horizon length and show that the prices are increasing in time and that, for very low network...

We analyse the optimal pricing choice of an incumbent firm that sells a good with network externalities and is threatened by the entry of a higher quality variant. In the framework of a vertical differentiation model, we find a necessary and sufficient condition under which quality improvement...