We study a market for a homogeneous good in which firms adjust their production decisions on the basis of imitation, learning from own experience, and local experimentation. For any fixed set of firms (more than one), long run behaviour settles on a symmetric marginal-cost pricing equilibrium....

We present a model of spatial price discrimination where R&D spillovers are endogenous as they depend on firms' location. We establish that both the distance between locations and R&D efforts are increasing functions of the transportation cost coefficient and show that there is a continuum of...

We present a three-stage game where two firms choose location, R&D and price, under the assumption that R&D spillovers depend on firms' location. That is, the closer firms are to each other, the greater the benefit they receive from their rivals' efforts in quality-enhancing R&D. We show that...

This paper is a brief survey of the principal issues attached to the privatisation of British Rail. It is written non-technically and without footnotes to maximise potential readership. It is a summary of a much larger and more detailed paper, On the Wrong Tracks: the Government's Proposals for...

Some preliminary results are presented from a pilot study of the contracting-out of public services in Scotland. The results suggest that dispute resolution works smoothly and efficiently in these contracts but that there are increases in costs of administration at the bidding stage.