We study a market model in which competing firms use costly marketing devices to influence the set of alternatives which consumers perceive as relevant. Consumers in our model are boundedly rational in the sense that they have an imperfect perception of what is relevant to their decision...

Arguing that consumers are the carriers of firms’ reputations, we examine the role of consumer networks for trust in markets that suffer from moral hazard. When consumers are embedded in a network, they can exchange information with their neighbours about their private experiences with...

We experimentally examine the effects of flexible and fixed prices in markets for experience goods in which demand is driven by trust. With flexible prices, we observe low prices and high quality in competitive (oligopolistic) markets, and high prices coupled with low quality in non-competitive...

We study the effects of reputation and competition in a stylized market for experience goods. If interaction is anonymous, such markets perform poorly: sellers are not trustworthy, and buyers do not trust sellers. If sellers are identifiable and can, hence, build a reputation, efficiency...

We examine a "Rotten Kid" model (Becker 1974) where a player with social preferences interacts with an egoistic player. We assume that social preferences are intention-based rather than outcome-based. In a very general multi-stage setting we show that any equilibrium must involve mutually unkind...

This paper modifies the heterogenous firms and trade model by Melitz (2003) by explicitly modelling the entry cost of a firm in a new market as a function of market size. This leads to several new predictions compared to the standard model: The productivity of non exporters and exporters depends...

Firms’ decisions about which goods to produce are often made at a more disaggregate level than the data observed by empirical researchers. When products differ according to production technique or the way in which they enter demand, this data aggregation problem introduces a bias into standard...

In most transition countries the aggregate level evidence suggests that most industries are just destroying jobs, due to the legacy of communism where over-manning levels of employment were the norm. This Paper sheds light on whether the transition process in Slovenian manufacturing has been one...

During transition, maintaining employment and providing a social safety net for the unemployed are important to social stability, which in turn is crucial for the productivity of the whole economy. Because independent institutions for social safety are lacking and firms with strong profit...

A quality improvement often necessitates modifications of varietal product features. This paper studies firms’ incentives to provide quality when this decision affects the goods’ degree of horizontal differentiation. Intuitively, one is inclined to argue that private incentives to provide...