Persistent and significant privately-held stockpiles of crude oil have long been an important empirical regularity in the United States. Such stockpiles would not rationally be held in a traditional Hotelling-style model. How then can the existence of these inventories be explained? In the...

Governments contracting with private agents for the provision of an impure public good must contend with agents who would potentially supply the good absent any payments. This additionality problem is centrally important in the use of carbon offsets as part of climate change mitigation....

In many cases consumers cannot observe firms’ investment in quality or safety, but have only beliefs on the average quality of the industry. In addition, the outcome of the collective investment game of the firms may be stochastic since firms cannot control perfectly the technology or external...

The important role of friends, neighbors and colleagues in shaping individual choices has been brought out in a number of studies over the years. The presence of significant ‘local’ influence in shaping individual behavior suggests that firms, governments and developmental agencies should...

A model of two-sided market (for credit cards) is introduced and discussed. In this model, agents can join none, one, or more than one platform (multihoming), depending on access prices and the choices made by agents on the opposite market side. Although emerging multihoming patterns are,...

In this paper we extend the model of vertical product differentiation to also consider information disparities about the extent of quality differences. Equilibrium prices turn out to depend not only on the share of informed consumers but also on uninformed consumers beliefs about quality...

This paper presents an examination of the socially efficient formation of environmental R&D in Cournot duopoly in a setting where a regulator has no precommitment ability for an emission tax. The results reveal that if the environmental damage is slight, alternatively, given severe environmental...

Characterizing the future performance of energy technologies can improve the development of energy policies that have net benefits under a broad set of future conditions. In particular, decisions about public investments in research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) that promote...

Expert elicitations of future energy technology costs can improve energy policy design by explicitly characterizing uncertainty. However, the recent proliferation of expert elicitation studies raises questions about the reliability and comparability of the results. In this paper, we standardize...

We use a panel of European firms to investigate the relationship between intangible assets and productivity. We disentangle between tfp and technology adoption, while available studies so far have considered only a notion of productivity conflating the two effects. To this aim, we estimate...