Firms compete by choosing both a price and a design from a family of designs that can be represented as demand rotations. Consumers engage in costly sequential search among firms. Each time a consumer pays a search cost he observes a new offering. An offering consists of a price quote and a new...

We present a model of timing of seasonal sales where stores choose several designs at the beginning of the season without knowing wich one, if any, will be fashionable. Fashionable designs have a chance to fetch high prices in fashion markets while non-fashionable ones must be sold in a discount...

I study a repeated buyer-seller relationship for the exchange of a given good. Asymmetric information over the buyer's reservation price, which is subject to random shocks, may lead the seller to use a rigid pricing policy despite the possibility of making higher profits through price...

In analyzing the distinctive contribution of foreign subsidiaries and domestic firms to productivity growth in aggregate Belgian manufacturing, this paper shows that foreign ownership is an important source of firm heterogeneity affecting productivity dynamics. Foreign firms have contributed...

This chapter proposes two hypotheses on the publicity requirement and the limitations of possession to provide information for legal titling. It then tests these hypotheses by examining how legal systems deal with possession in movable and immovable property, and comparing actual and documentary...

Adopting a simplistic view of Coase (1960), most economic analyses of property rights disregard both the key advantage that legal property rights (that is, in rem rights) provide to rightholders in terms of enhanced enforcement, and the difficulties they pose to acquirers in terms of information...

Governments and international development agencies often fail in their efforts to build and reform property and company registries. They implement misguided policies rooted in a poor understanding of the role that registries play in the modern economy. This work aims to remedy this situation by...

Most economic interactions happen in a context of sequential exchange in which innocent third parties suffer information asymmetry with respect to previous "originative" contracts. The law reduces transaction costs by protecting these third parties but preserves some element of consent by...