This article analyzes the role of suggested prices in the Dutch retail market for gasoline. Suggested prices are announced by large oil companies with the suggestion that retailers follow them. There are at least two competing rationales for the existence of suggested prices: they may either...

What is a 'sustainable nation’ and how can we identify and rank ‘sustainable nations’? Are nations producing and consuming in a sustainable way? Aggregate indicators have been proposed to answer these questions. This paper quantitatively compares three aggregate indicators of...

One of the policy options to increase the efficiency in the provision of scarce water resources is a reduction in transaction costs in water chains by developing integrated forms of water management. Integrated water management in case of river basin areas may comprise inter alia: (1) increasing...

Is there a case to be made for preferential treatment of the exposed sector in an economy when compliance to an aggregate emissions constraint induced by an international environmental agreement is mandatory? This question is being debated in many countries, including The Netherlands, in the...

We empirically investigate the responsiveness of international trade to the stringency of environmental regulation. Stringent environmental regulation may impair the export competitiveness of ‘dirty’ domestic industries, and as a result, ‘pollution havens’ emerge in countries where...

We study a consumer non-sequential search oligopoly model with search cost heterogeneity. We first prove that an equilibrium in mixed strategies always exists. We then examine the nonparametric identification and estimation of the costs of search. We find that the sequence of points on the...

In this paper we investigate whether markets with heterogeneous network externalities can be locked-in by old technologies even if superior technologies are available. Heterogeneous network externalities are present when some consumers care more about the size of the market share of a good than...

We develop a model of strategic networks that captures two distinctive features of interfirm collaboration: bilateral agreements and nonexclusive relationships. Our analysis highlights the relationship between market competition, firms' incentives to invest in R&D, and the architecture of...

We study a two-sided market where a platform attracts firms selling differentiated products and buyers interested in those products. In the unique subgame perfect equilibrium of the game, the platform fully internalizes the network externalities present in the market and firms and consumers all...

In a recent paper Hong and Shum [2006. Using price distributions to estimate search costs. Rand Journal of Economics 37, 257–275] present a structural method to estimate search cost distributions. We extend their approach to the case of oligopoly and present a new maximum likelihood method to...