In many countries entrepreneurship is promoted through tax reductions for small businesses and by various government support schemes. We analyze the effects of such policies to subsidize small businesses in a setting where both the risk-return characteristics of the selected innovation project...

Trade unions are often argued to cause allocative inefficiencies and to lower welfare. We analyze whether this evaluation is also justified in a Cournot-oligopoly with free but costly entry. If input markets are competitive and output per firm declines with the number of firms (business...

We analyze spying out a rival’s price in a Bertrand market game with incomplete information. Spying transforms a simultaneous into a robust sequential moves game. We provide conditions for profitable espionage. The spied at firm may attempt to immunize against spying by delaying its pricing...

In recent decades the Indian subcontinent has displayed remarkable invariance in the incidence of working poverty despite strong economic performance. It is widely held that education can rescue households from various types of poverty traps created by information problems and incorrect...

This article examines the role of the interaction between product market and labor market imperfections in determining total factor productivity growth (TFPG). Embedding Dobbelaere and Mairesse's (2009) generalization of Hall's (1990) approach, allowing for the possibility that wages are...

I introduce a reduced form two-sided market model to study prediction and identification in two-sided markets. The model generates the hallmark features of two-sided markets: potentially below cost or even negative prices to one side of the market, and the “see-saw” or “waterbed” effect...

Corporate success stories often resemble a snowball. We show how initial luck in hiring talented people, the resulting technological advantage, superior corporate culture, and statusseeking by workers and by consumers can make small initial differences generate large differences over time.

Data brokers collect, manage, and sell customer data. We propose a simple model, in which data brokers sell data to downstream firms. We characterise the optimal strategy of data brokers and highlight the role played by the data structure for co-opetition. If data are “sub-additive”, with...

The unprecedented access of firms to consumer level data not only facilitates more precisely targeted individual pricing but also alters firms’ strategic incentives. We show that exclusive access to a list of consumers can provide incentives for a firm to endogenously assume the price...

We consider a dynamic oligopoly on the beer market and study the differential effects of switching costs on product prices, market shares, and profits. Our demand estimation results show large differences in brand loyalty, and switching costs across customer income segments and beer brands. Our...