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...

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...

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...

In this paper we analyze the innovative performance of alliance networks as a function of the technological distance between partners, a firm's network position (centrality) and total network density.We study how these three elements of an alliance network, apart and in combination, affect the...

In the past China's rural areas, home to 70% of its population, suffered energy shortages.China's indigenous energy resources are limited, with the exception of coal.The widespread use of coal requires large investments in production and transport -making it costly-, and degrades the...

Managers are risk averse. Excessive risk-aversion can destroy shareholder wealth. A key source of risk is the threat of an opportunistic takeover designed to take advantage of depressed market prices. This is especially the case in innovative or hard-to-value (`HtV') companies whose price may be...