This paper unifies two significant but somewhat contradictory ideas. First, search costs potentially influence market price equilibria significantly; in many equilibria consumers do not search despite above-competitive prices. Second, cartels must guard against individual members offering lower...

A large literature has accumulated which examines how the optimal solution of an agent maximising the expectations of a real-valued function depending on a rendom parameter p and the agents's behaviour x reacts to pertubations in the first and second moments of p. In this literature p is given...

An increase over time in the proportion of young people obtaining a degree is likely to impact on the relative ability compositions (i) of graduates and non-graduates and (ii) across graduates with different classes of degree award. In a signalling framework, we examine the implications of this...

In this paper we seek to characterize a market for heterogeneous managers created by heterogeneous firms and the decisions on investment in both sector-specific and firm-specific human capital when those decisions are made prior to the realization of firms' profitability and the degree of...

Rational expectations is a maintained assumption in the analysis of economic policy. Here we examine how two types of learning rational expectations (rational and econometric) affect the time profile of optimal policy. In both cases the government adopts policies which delay convergence to...