We analyze competition among clubs in which the status of club members is the crucial added value accruing to fellow club members through social interaction within the club (e.g. in country clubs, academic faculties, or internet communities). In the course of competition for new members, clubs...

Abstract: We study the capacity of business associations - private, formal, noncommercial organizations designed to promote the common business interests of their members - to support contract enforcement and collective action. Inspired by recent empirical literature, our theoretical framework...

Cloud computing technologies have the potential to increase innovation and economic growth considerably. But many users worry that data in the cloud can be accessed by others, thereby damaging the data owner. Consequently, they do not use cloud technologies up to the efficient level. I design an...

Should mergers among nonprofit organizations be regulated differently than mergers among for-profit firms? The relevant empirical literature is highly controversial, the theoretical literature is scarce. I analyze the question by modeling duopoly competition with quality-differentiated goods. I...

Abstract: This paper studies the strategies employed by Catholic and Protestant nonprofit hospitals in Germany and traces them back to the theological foundations of those religions, which shape managers' values. We find that Catholic nonprofit hospitals follow a strategy of horizontal...

This paper formalizes the difference between firms, nonprofits, and cooperatives and identifies optimal organizational choice. In a model of quality provision, we find a clear ranking of quality produced: Firms provide lowest and nonprofits highest levels of quality. Efficiency, however, depends...

Many experimental studies indicate that people are motivated by reciprocity. Rabin (1993) develops techniques for incorporating such concerns into game theory and economics. His model, however, does not fare well when applied to situations with an interesting dynamic structure (like many...

Abstract: We compare default rates on conventional and Islamic loans using a comprehensive monthly dataset from Pakistan that follows more than 150,000 loans over the period 2006:04 to 2008:12. We find robust evidence that the default rate on Islamic loans is less than half the default rate on...

This paper estimates the price of ethics by studying the risk-return relation in socially responsible investment (SRI) funds. Consistent with investors paying a price for ethics, SRI funds in many European and Asia-Pacific countries strongly underperform domestic benchmark portfolios by about 5%...

The constrained egalitarian solution of Dutta and Ray (1989) for TU-games is extended to asymmetric cases, using the notion of weight systems as in Kalai and Samet (1987,1988). This weighted constrained egalitarian solution is based on the weighted Lorenz-criterion as an inequality measure. It...