Sports organizations, Hollywood studios and TV channels grant satellite and cable networks exclusive rights to televise their matches, movies and media contents. Exclusive distribution prevents viewers from watching attractive programs, and reduces the TV-distributors incentives to compete in...

We examine the effects of emigration and remittances on the corruption experience of migrant household members staying in the countries of origin. We hypothesize that the effects of emigration on corruption can be both positive (via migrant value transfer) and negative (via misuse of monetary...

Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the Habsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens’ trust in local public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the...

We present a model of optimal contracting between a purchaser and a provider of health services when quality has two dimensions. We assume that one dimension of quality is verifiable (dimension 1) and one dimension is not verifiable (dimension 2). We show that the power of the incentive scheme...

Performance indicators are increasingly used to regulate quality in health care and other areas of the public sector. We develop a model of contracting between a purchaser (principal) and a provider (agent) under the following scenarios: a) higher ability increases quality directly and...

This Paper explores how the government’s choice of renewal policy in public procurement programmes can be used as a mechanism to provide firms with incentives to supply quality. Several firms produce a public service. The firms participate in a tournament where they are ranked according to the...

Professional standards vary across professions and also change over time. One profession which has remained perfectionist is classical music, where the amount of practising is striking compared with other professions. Practising is a matter of increasing the reliability of ones skills rather...

We investigate the effect of competition on quality in regulated markets (e.g., health care, higher education, public utilities), using a Hotelling framework, in the presence of sluggish demand. We take a differential game approach, and derive the open-loop solution (providers commit to an...

We examine price competition under product-specific network effects, in a duopoly where the products are differentiated horizontally and vertically. When consumers' expectations are not affected by prices, firms may share the market equally, or one firm (possibly the low-quality one) may capture...

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from non experimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a pro-competitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The...