It is well known that uncertainty concerning firms' costs as well as market power of the latter have to be taken into account in order to design and choose environmental policy instruments in an optimal way. As a matter of fact, in the most actual regulation settings the policy maker has to face...

It is well known that uncertainty concerning firms' costs as well as market power of the latter have to be taken into account in order to design and choose environmental policy instruments in an optimal way. As a matter of fact, in most actual regulation settings the policy maker has to face...

For several years, an increasing number of firms are investing in Open Source Software (OSS). While improvements in such a non-excludable public good cannot be appropriated, companies can benefit indirectly in a complementary proprietary segment. We study this incentive for investment in OSS. In...

This study uses a comprehensive framework to quantify the welfare changes of rural and non-rural households in Mexico associated with the food price crisis of 2007. The total change in welfare is decomposed into five contributors. I find that income effects, i.e. changes through profits and...

In this paper, we use an experimental setup to classify cooperation types using a sequential prisoner's dilemma and a one shot sequential public goods game. In these two games, we examine the within subject stability of cooperation preferences. Our results suggest that subjects classified as...

Much of the literature on financial markets has not dealt with dependency of project revenues. In a setup similar to the seminal SW model, we show that the type of equilibrium can crucially depend on the degree of project dependency. By making aggregate payoffs risky, households face capital...

This paper analyzes competition for capital between welfare-maximizing governments in a framework with agglomeration tendencies and asymmetric unionization. We find that a unionized country's government finds it optimal to use tax policy to induce industry to relocate towards a location with a...

Imposing a minimum quality standard (MQS) is conventionally regarded as harmful if firms compete in quantities. This, however, ignores its possible dynamic effects. We show that an MQS can hinder collusion, resulting in dynamic welfare gains that reduce and may outweigh the static losses which...

Recent empirical studies suggest a need for a flexible patent regime responding to industry characteristics. In practice, sector-specific modifications of patent strength already exist but lack theoretical foundation. This paper intends to make up for this neglect by scrutinizing in what...

Cooperation among savings and cooperative banks was criticized by the European Commission because of potentially anti-competitive effects. In an industrial economics model of banks taking deposits and giving loans we look at regional demarcation as one of such cooperative practices. There are...