It is argued that the German system of supporting low wage income earners by government transfers gives incentives for employers and employees to contract low wages and then to exploit the government. The paper analyses if such incentives do exist. It turns out that this is the case under...

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...

This paper discusses a simultaneous market entry game between two firms with different fixed costs. This case is a typical application of mixed strategy equilibria. Conventional wisdom would suggest that the low-cost firm is more likely to enter the market. This presumption is wrong. Instead,...

This paper demonstrates that the Bertrand paradox does not hold if cost functions are strictly convex. Instead, multiple equilibria exist which can be Pareto-ranked. The paper shows that the Pareto-dominant equilibrium may imply profus higher than in Cournot competition or may even sustain...

The paper studies indirect network effects in a market composed by two incompatible intermediaries that choose price (short-term issue) in addition to location (long-term issue). The paper first shows that (i) when the network externality is sufficiently weak, only maximum differentiation...

Output gap estimates at the current edge are subject to severe revisions. This study analyzes whether monetary aggregates can be used to improve the reliability of early output gap estimates as proposed by several theoretical models. A real-time experiment shows that real M1 can improve output...

A transactions model of the demand for multiple media of exchange is developed. Some results are expected, and others are both new and surprising. There are both extensive and intensive margins to currency substitution, and inflation may affect the two margins differently, leading to subtle...

Empirical analyses of Cagan?s money demand schedule for hyper-inflation have largely ignored the explosive nature of hyper-inflationary data. It is argued that this contributes to an (i) inability to model the data to the end of the hyper-inflation, and to (ii) discrepancies between ?estimated?...