The paper applies the evolutionary concept to an analysis of the role of intellectual property rights protection in the model of two countries North and South (and two firms) where only the Northern firm conducts innovative activity. The concept of social evolution and learning in oligopolistic...

We compare the social welfare generated by a domestic government in the two types of policy setups: a "commitment" regime in which the government sets its policy instrument before the strategic choice is made by the domestic firm and a "non-commitment" regime where the policy variable is set...

Marginal cost pricing of running water and sewerage services has long been the default recommendation of economists and natural resource specialists to firms and local governments. However, water pricing has never been studied simultaneously with the water metering problem before. The socially...

This paper argues that advertising should be regarded as a transaction between a consumer and a firm that potentially generates a mutual benefit. We develop that there exists a problem of adverse selection, however, which makes it impossible to establish direct markets for advertising. The media...

In most OECD countries, the business services industry has grown much faster than the market sector as a whole. The industry in most cases, however, has displayed stagnating productivity growth, in some periods even a fall in productivity. Does this fast-growing industry with a bad productivity...

A firm must decide whether to launch a new product. A launch implies considerable fixed costs, so the firm would like to assess downstream demand before it decides. We study under which conditions a potential buyer would be willing to reveal his willingness to pay under different pricing...

We empirically study the price adjustment process at multiproduct retail stores. We use a unique store level data set for five large supermarket and one drugstore chains in the U.S., to document the exact process required to change prices. Our data set allows us to study this process in great...

Heroic Plant research shows that persistently-rapid job creation by a select group of plants can be an important source of overall employment growth in manufacturing. Establishments in SICs 34 - 38 whose residual growth (after controlling for differences in plant age, size, industry, etc.) ranks...

The United States Congress recently enacted sweeping legislation to overhaul the rules governing competition in telecommunications services. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (see Congressional Record, 1996) is the first major rewrite of the Communications Act of 1934. It also supersedes the...