This paper analyses market competition between two different types of credit card platforms: not-for-profit associations and proprietary systems. The main focus is on the role of the interchange fee set by not-for-profit platforms. We show that when the interchange fee is set so as to maximise...

The comparison of different tax schedules is a problem of high dimensionality. In the current paper it is proved that under very general assumptions a utilitarian welfare function and an inequality index compose a sufficient statistic for the after-tax welfare distribution, reducing...

In this paper we argue that pricing is all about price changes, and that the costs of price changes are often simultaneously subtle and substantial. We discuss a framework to deal with the dynamics of changing prices. This framework incorporates customer interpretations of price changes, an...

This paper develops a model of pricing and advertising in a matching environment with capacity constrained sellers. Sellers' expenditure on directly informative advertising attracts consumers only probabilistically. Consumers who happen to observe advertisements randomize over the advertised...

Spatially differentiated duopolists set higher-than-monopoly prices at some distances. This phenomenon is shown to occur in any finite- dimensional space for a class of reservation prices that covers concavity and convexity in perceived distance from a design. But an upper bound on the...

Theoretical study identifying one modality with conditions necesary for the financial stabilization of an inherently unstable system; and 5040 other unstable dynamic modes. It draws on knowledge made available by the academic field of Control Engineering.

We use an experiment to explore how subjects learn to play against computers which are programmed to follow one of a number of standard learning algorithms. The learning theories are (unbeknown to subjects) a best response process, fictitious play, imitation, reinforcement learning, and a trial...

We discuss the case of a monopolist of a base good in the presence of complementary goods provided either by it or by other firms. We assess and calibrate the extent of the influence on the profits from the base good that is created by the existence of complementary goods, i.e., the extent of...

Previous literature has mostly considered R&D and licensing activities separately. In this paper we examine the effect of licensing on R&D and social welfare. We show that the effect of licensing on the incentive for doing R&D is ambiguous and depends on the costs of doing R&D. We also show that...

We apply an indirect method to test for the extent of loss leader pricing. Specifically, the extent of loss leader pricing should increase with the profit from other regularly-priced items. Bookstores customarily use bestsellers as loss leaders. Among conventional bookstores, we found that the...