The paper presents a model of educational production which tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government...

This paper reviews some of the economic experimental evidence on conformism. There is nothing to match the early psychology experiments where subjects were often swayed by the behaviour of others to an extraordinary degree, but there is plenty of evidence of conformism. This seems built-in to...

In 2011, price peaks in retail gasoline prices caused public outrage and attracted the attention of German regulatory agencies. After having examined the market, competition authorities concluded that tacit collusion existed but could not easily be prosecuted under the given competition law. In...

The author analyses delegation in homogenous duopoly under the assumption that the firm-managers compete in supply functions. In supply function equilibrium, managers' decisions are strategic complements. This reverses earlier findings in that the author finds that owners give managers...

Bilateral trade and capital flows have increased substantially between the United States and China yielding economic gains to both countries. However, these beneficial bilateral relations also bring about global environmental consequences including greenhouse gas emissions. We develop a...

Industrial organization is mainly concerned with the behavior of large firms, especially when it comes to oligopoly theory. Experimental industrial organization therefore faces a problem: How can firms be brought into the laboratory? The main approach relies on framing: Call individuals firms!...

The authors study pure strategy Bertrand equilibria in a duopoly in which two firms produce a homogeneous good with convex cost functions, and they seek to maximize the weighted sum of their absolute and relative profits. They show that there exists a range of the equilibrium price in...

Companies with market power occasionally engage in intentional quality reduction of a portion of their output as a means of offering two qualities of goods for the purpose of price discrimination, even absent a cost saving. This paper provides an exact characterization in terms of marginal...

The expansion of higher education in theWestern countries has been accompanied by a marked widening of wage differentials and increasing overqualification. While the increase in wage differentials has been attributed to skill-biased technological change that made advanced skills scarce, this...

Network-effects may lead to imperfect competition and may therefore make a Strategie trade policy attractive for a country exporting network goods. I analyze the implications of Strategie trade policy in a model of horizontal produetdifferentiation with network effects. Within this framework,...