Background: General Practitioners have limited means to compete. As quality is hard to observe by patients, GPs have incentives to signal quality by using instruments patients perceive as quality.<br/>Objectives: We investigate whether GPs exhibit different prescribing behavior (volume and value of...

Abstract: We study the effects of improvements in eBay’s rating mechanism on seller exit and continuing sellers’ behavior. Following a large sample of sellers over time, we exploit the fact that the rating mechanism was changed to reduce strategic bias in buyer rating. That improvement did...

This paper studies the consequence of an imprecise recall of the price by the consumers in the Bertrand price competition model for a homogeneous good. It is shown that firms can exploit this weakness and charge prices above the competitive price. This markup increases for rougher recall of the...

Abstract: We implement a trust game in which the trustee can write a free-form pre-play message for the trustor. The main twist in our design is that there is a 50% probability that the message is delivered to the trustor and a 50% probability that the message is replaced by an empty sheet. We...

Abstract: Using a newly constructed dataset on German hospitals, which includes 24 process and outcome indicators of clinical quality, we test whether quality has increased in various clinical areas since the introduction of mandatory quality reports and the online publication of part of the...

This paper introduces a simple extensive form pricing game.The Bertrand outcome is a Nash equilibrium outcome in this game, but it is not necessarily subgame perfect.The subgame perfect equilibrium outcome features the following comparative static properties.The more similar firms are, the...

How do banks react to increased interbank competition?Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of competition on bank orientation í L H WKH choice of relationship based versus transactional banking í DQG EDQN LQGXVWU\ specialization.We empirically investigate the...