This paper considers the endogenous formation of an institution to provide a public good. If the institution governs only its members, players have an incentive to free ride on the institution formation of others and the social dilemma is simply shifted to a higher level. Addressing this...

More often than not production processes are the joint endeavor of people having different abilities and productivities. Such production processes and the associated surplus production are often not fully transparent in the sense that the relative contributions of involved agents are blurred;...

Does the cultural background influence the success with which genetically unrelated individuals cooperate in social dilemma situations? In this paper we provide an answer by analyzing the data of Herrmann et al. (Science 2008, pp. 1362-1367), who study cooperation and punishment in sixteen...

Social interactions predominantly take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature explains cooperation in indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma as predominantly driven by self-interested strategic considerations. This paper provides a causal test of the importance of social...

We study effects of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) in the prescription drug market. There are two pharmaceutical firms providing horizontally differentiated (branded) drugs. Patients differ in their susceptibility to the drugs. If DTCA is allowed, this can be employed to induce...

We provide a theoretical framework to contribute to the current debate regarding the tendency of pharmaceutical companies to direct their R&D toward marketing products that are “follow-on” drugs of already existing drugs, rather than toward the development of breakthrough drugs. We construct...

TNF-alpha inhibitors represent one of the most important areas of biopharmaceuticals by sales, with three blockbusters accounting for 8 % of total pharmaceutical sale in Norway. With use of a unique natural policy experiment in Norway, this paper examines to what extent the identity of the...

We study the impact of regulation on competition between brand-names and generics and pharmaceutical expenditures using a unique policy experiment in Norway, where reference pricing (RP) replaced price cap regulation in 2003 for a sub-sample of off-patent products. First, we construct a vertical...