We show that returns policies do increase manufacturer profitability by attenuating price competition between retailers …. This effect holds only in the presence of end-user demand uncertainty. The conditions under which a returns policy raises … returns policies serve both to dampen competition and resolve demand uncertainty. …

The distributional form of financial asset returns has important implications for the theoretical and empirical … generally, the volatility of the price return distributions of Calvet and Fisher's (2002) Multifractal Model for Asset Returns …, and thus of the nonstationarity of the financial returns. Keywords: Stable distributions, price diffusion, stability …