In 2003 Kenya abolished user fees in all government primary schools. We find that this Free Primary Education (FPE) policy resulted in a decline in public school quality and increased demand for private schooling.  However, the former did not reflect a decline in value added by public schools -...

I show that the fiscal position of the UK means it will be very hard for the next government to allow the undergraduate fee cap to increase beyond the rate of inflation.  The funding postion of the higher education sector can be improved by the government removing the interest rate subsidy it...

Competition authorities all over the world worry that integration between search engines (mainly Google) and publishers could lead to abuses of dominant position.  In particular, one concern is that of own-content bias, meaning that Google would bias its rankings in favor of the publishers it...

Traditionally, the scholarly journal market operates so that research institutions are charged high prices and the wider public is often excluded altogether, while authors can usually publish for free and commercial publishers enjoy high profits.  Two forms of open access regulation can...

Ultimatum games have been extensively used in experimental studies. By studying the consequences that restrictions shared by ultimatum games have in subject`s behaviour, this paper argues that some results are falsified by design constraints. This paper also presets a taxonomy of certification,...

We examine some of the factors that might influence the quality of information produced in discussion groups on the internet, such as USENET and the WELL. In particular, we look at the impact of various different pricing structures, and compare regimes in which anonymity is enforced with regimes...

Through an experiment this study investigates the effects that verification has on honest traders. This paper demonstrates that by reducing the scope for trust verification can have a negative effect on the behaviour of honest individuals. Specifically, the analysis shows that trustworthy agents...

This paper shows that a monopolistic certifying party can have incentives to disclose revealing information about the agent he is certifying. Using a three-person game-theoretic model and allowing certificate users (buyers) to have noisy estimates of the quality level of the agent being...

We examine some of the factors that might influence the quality of information produced in discussion groups on the internet, such as USENET and the WELL. In particular, we look at the impact of various different pricing structures, and compare regimes in which anonymity is enforced with regimes...

This paper shows that a monopolistic certifying party can have incentives to disclose revealing information about the agent he is certifying. Using a three-person game-theoretic model and allowing certificate users (buyers) to have noisy estimates of the quality level of the agent being...