We study the economic impacts of the interaction between a regulator's Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection policy against software piracy on the one side and the forms of IPR protection that software producers may themselves undertake to protect their intellectual property on the other...

Two software developers, each offering a product variety of different (exogenously given) quality, compete in prices for heterogeneous users who choose from purchasing a legal version, using an illegal copy, and not using a product at all. Using an illegal version violates intellectual property...

We study how the strength of public intellectual property rights (IPR) protection against software piracy (copyright protection) affects private IPR protection (that software developers may themselves undertake to protect their IPR). There are two software developers that offer a product variety...

I compare certification and self-regulation, two widely used quality assurance mechanisms in markets where consumers do not observe the quality of goods. Certification is a mechanism in which an external firm oers a certificate to producers who undergo a testing procedure, issues the certificate...

I study the competition between one nonprofit and one for-profit firm under various objective functions of the nonprofit firm. The two firms optimize their objectives with respect to quality and price of their products. The nonprofit firm serves one-half of the market under pure quality...

Promoting competition among electricity producers is crucial for ensuring allocative efficiency and lower electricity prices. In this paper, I empirically examine the electricity market of England and Wales in order to analyze to what extent the regulatory reforms were successful in promoting...

Much has been written on the distinction between vertical and horizontal foreign direct investment. However, most of the empirical literature relies on indirect and aggregated measures only. The aim of this paper is to help fill this gap by examining the differences between German affiliates in...

We empirically assess whether firms face economies and/or diseconomies of scale with respect to air pollution control by evaluating the effects of production on firmlevel air emission levels using a panel of Czech firms during the country’s transitional period of 1993 to 1998. By estimating a...

In this paper we address an asymmetric information problem in the fundraising industry, the fundraising problem. The problem arises from donors’ lack of information about the quality of charities that solicit donations. We focus on one particular solution of this problem, certification, where...

We analyze tournaments of heterogeneous players from an organizer’s perspective. Using a simple model of a noisy tournament, we demonstrate how the likelihood of selecting the best player, here termed the “predictive power” of a tournament, depends on the tournament format, the...