It is commonly observed that across societies and time, women tend to marry older men. The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that wages increase with age and hence older men are more attractive in the marriage market. The explanation holds even where differences in fertility between...

I study the consequences of heterogeneity of skills for the design of an optimal unemployment insurance, using a principal-agent set-up with a risk neutral insurer and infinitely lived risk averse agents. Agents, who are characterised by different productivities or skills, are employed by firms...

We combine two data sets to study price rigidity. The first consists of weekly time series of retail, wholesale, and spot prices for twelve products. These time series contain two exogenous cost shocks. We find that prices exhibit more rigidity in response to the second shock than the first. The...

It has been documented that retail gasoline prices respond more quickly to increases in wholesale price than to decreases. However, there is very little theoretical or empirical evidence identifying the market characteristics responsible for this behavior. This paper presents a new theoretical...

The paper empirically analyses the effect of R&D activities, human resource and knowledge management, and the organisation of knowledge sharing within a firm on the absorptive capacity of innovative firms for three different types of knowledge, namely absorptive capacity to use knowledge from a...

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...

Within a one-shot, duopoly game, we show that firms cannot use false in- store price comparisons to deter rational consumers from further beneficial price search in an effort to create market power. However, by introducing a consumer protection authority that monitors price comparisons, we...

A representative investor in a competitive financial market is uncertain about the true state of the economy. This uncertainty is reflected by a probability distribution of values which the investor forms subjectively based on information that is arriving randomly. The subjective distribution of...

Fictitious play and ``gradient'' learning are examined in the context of a large population where agents are repeatedly randomly matched. We show that the aggregation of this learning behaviour can be qualitatively different from learning at the level of the individual. This aggregate dynamic...

We develop a general model of best response adaptation in large populations for symmetric and asymmetric conflicts with role-switching. For special cases including the classical best response dynamics and the symmetrized best response dynamics we show that the set of Nash equilibria is...