Why are higher quality niches seen as intrinsically more profitable in business circles? Why do high quality products sometimes have a low real price, while it is unusual to see low quality products with high real prices? Can markets have quality differentiation as well as quality bunching? In...

Thereare three points made in this paper. The first is that the question concerning choice of a product line by a monopolist is similar in structure to other adverse selection problems -- and can be analyzed in an elementary way by adapting techniques recently developed for such problems. Such...

We develop a new model of quality to capture the idea that even if a customer chooses to purchase a product, it may fail to deliver.' In this event, the customer may wish to choose some other product. We model this as a two stage game where firms first choose quality and then price. We find that...

With imperfectly competitive product markets, producers react to the auction of quota licenses by adjusting price upwards from the free trade level. As a result, license revenues are significantly lower than if markets were perfectly competitive. In fact, they are often zero unless quotas are...

This paper analyzes some aspects of the effects of trade restrictions (such as tariffs, quotas and quality controls) and their desirability when the quantity of the imported good is endogenous, and the foreign producer is a monopolist. It uses a fairly general model based on the work of Spence...

In the presence of asymmetric information, the stage at which financing decisions are made about investment projects in a small open economy is crucial for the composition of international capital inflows as well as for the efficiency of channeling savings into investment. This paper compares...

In contrast to recent literature, we show that market access requirements (MARs) can be implemented in a procompetitive manner even in the absence of threats in related markets. By focusing on subsidies that are paid only when the requirement is met, we show that a MAR can increase aggregate...

In Razin, Sadka and Yuen (1998, 1999a), we explored the policy implications of the home-bias in international portfolio investment as a result of asymmetric information problems in which domestic savers, being 'close' to the domestic market, have an informational advantage over foreign portfolio...

In a static setup, migration of unskilled labor may be resisted by the entire native-born population because, being relatively low earners, migrants are net beneficiaries of the fiscal system. However, the paper shows that with a pay-as-you-go pension, an important pillar of the welfare state,...

In oligopolistic situations content protection can have unexpected effects as it changes the nature of interactions between input suppliers. With a duoply, it does so in a manner that makes the foreign firm wish to match price increases and decreases of the domestic firm. Domestic input...