Place names, or toponyms, provide insight into the initial geographical characteristics of settlements. We present a unique dataset of 3,705 German toponyms that includes the date of the first historical record mentioning the settlement and the date it was granted city rights. We show that the...

Fuel prices are commonly perceived to be excessively high, which regularly triggers political discussions about fuel price regulations. Consumers demand stricter fuel price regulations to provide transparency about the current price level and to protect them from sudden price fluctuations. Such...

A non-trivial fraction of people cannot afford to buy pharmaceutical products at unregulated market prices. Therefore, the paper analyzes the public insurance of the pharmaceutical products in terms of price controls and the socially optimal third-degree price discrimination. It characterizes...

People's fairness preferences are an important constraint for what constitutes an acceptable economic transaction, yet little is known about how these preferences are formed. In this paper, we provide clean evidence that contrast effects arising from previous transactions play an important role...

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.

We consider dynamic competition among platforms in a market with network externalities. A platform that dominated the market in the previous period becomes "focal" in the current period, in that agents play the equilibrium in which they adopt the focal platform whenever such equilibrium exists....

We harness big data to detect prime locations - large clusters of knowledge-based tradable services - in 125 global cities and track changes in the within-city geography of prime service jobs over a century. Historically smaller cities that did not develop early public transit networks are less...

This paper defines isomorphism for network formation that is not mathematically isomorphic. Once the pattern of network formation is characterized, one can test for (i) location fixed effects, (ii) heterogeneity, (iii) private information allowing for long-term contracts. The paper provides...

We discuss the literatures on behavioral economics, bounded rationality and experimental economics as they apply to firm behaviour in markets. Topics discussed include the impact of imitative and satisficing behavior by firms, outcomes when managers care about their position relative to peers,...