Despite extensive use of bargaining models in economics and despite Becker's insistence on the importance of altruism in families, the theoretical literature on bargaining ignores altruism and assumes that everyone is an egoist. This paper shows that incorporating altruism into cooperative...

We develop and test a theory of firm size and scope centered on standardization: the extent to which a firm's products are similar. Heterogeneous firms choose the number, quality and standardization of their products. Standardizing makes expanding scope less costly, which then increases the...

We study bank supervision by combining a theoretical model distinguishing supervision from regulation and a novel dataset on work hours of Federal Reserve supervisors. We highlight the trade-offs between the benefits and costs of supervision and use the model to interpret the relation between...

When physicians own complementary medical service facilities such as clinical laboratories and imaging centers, they gain financially by referring patients to these service entities. This situation creates an incentive for the physician to exploit the consumers' trust by recommending more...

A growing literature seeks to understand how the characteristics of firms shape the manner in which they serve foreign markets. We consider an environment in which multiproduct firms can sell their products in multiple countries from multiple locations. We show that there are strong empirical...

We explore the managerial implications and economic consequences of platform sharing under models of horizontal and vertical product differentiation. By using a common platform across different products, firms can save on fixed costs for platform development. At the same time, platform sharing...

What accounts for the diversity and limited concentration that has long characterized the organization of the advertising agency industry? This question is addressed by treating an advertising agency as a multiproduct firm. The firm's product line or service mix is defined in terms of the set of...

Throughout the industrialized world, macroeconomic performance since the mid-1970s has been very poor, and the prospects in the near term remain bleak. While there is no consensus among macroeconomists regarding the diagnosis (or cure) of these ills, the major competing schools of thought have...

We assess size and scope-related economies in the global advertising and marketing services business. A translog cost function is employed wherein a firm's costs vary according to its scale and two dimensions of the scope of its operations. Parameters of the model are estimated via three stage...