In this paper I investigate the effect of different stages of international trade on market structure and prices when production involves overhead cost, markets are intransparent, and customers have to search for offers. I show that two stages have to be distinguished: a first stage where each...

We propose a simple theory of predatory pricing, based on scale economies and sequential buyers (or markets). The entrant (or prey) needs to reach a critical scale to be successful. The incumbent (or predator) is ready to make losses on earlier buyers so as to deprive the prey of the scale it...

Insurance for natural hazards - earthquakes, hurricanes, or pandemics - is rarely comprehensively adopted without intense government intervention, and even then it is often only a minority of properties or businesses that are insured. Efforts to close this insurance gap include the introduction...

This paper questions how heterogeneity of beliefs about the probability of loss affects equilibrium insurance contracts, firm behavior, and welfare focusing especially on the effect of optimism when a monotonicity property, which is a major assumption of prior work, is violated. This paper shows...

It is well known that private information can impair the functioning of insurance markets,and widely documented that individuals misperceive their private information. But these twofacts are rarely analyzed jointly. I use panel data from a survey of the elderly that collectssubjective mortality...

Insurance for natural hazards - earthquakes, hurricanes, or pandemics - is rarely comprehensively adopted without intense government intervention, and even then it is often only a minority of properties or businesses that are insured. Efforts to close this insurance gap include the introduction...

We develop a model of international trade with increasing returns to scale by taking into account the possibility of cooperation among agents in an egalitarian economy. It is shown that each country gains from trade in a trading world in which there are arbitrary numbers of...

We develop a model of international trade with increasing returns to scale by taking into account the possibility of cooperation among agents in an egalitarian economy. It is shown that each country gains from trade in a trading world in which there are arbitrary numbers of...