This article shows some important aspects of a worldwide, historical phenomenon: the globalization of commerce and art which started in the second half of the sixteenth century and had the American, Asian and European territories of the Hispanic Monarchy as main protagonist during the Early...

What determines trade patterns? Habit persistence in consumer tastes and learning-by-doing in production imply that history and culture are key determinants. Deriving a dynamic gravity equation from a simple model, it is shown that cultural similarity is a product of history, so that trade...

This paper investigates the conventional wisdom that markets would naturally allocate the rights for performing decisional task to those players who might be best suited to perform the task. We embedded the decisional tasks in a stylised setting of a game, motivated by Littlewood(1953) Red Hat...

Publicly reported information on the environmental behavior of firms can increase the efficacy of private markets as a mechanism to control environmental malfeasance through liability for harm, consumer demand response, and shareholder reaction. In the case of mandatory information disclosure...

Taking note of the wide variety and growing list of models in the literature to explain patterns of behavior observed in laboratory experiments, this paper identifies two tests, the Variety Test (ability of a model to explain outcomes under variety or alternative scenarios) and the Psychological...

The rise in mega-retailers has contributed to a growing literature on buyer power and large-buyer discounts. According to Rotemberg and Saloner (1986) and Snyder (1998), large buyers' ability to obtain price discounts depends on their relative (rather than absolute) size and the degree of...

The paper presents the results of an economic experiment in which the effects of fees on allocative efficiency of tradable utilization permits (e.g. pollution permits) are explored. Laboratory subjects (university students) play the roles of firms whose generic product requires a specific input...

This paper reports 5 laboratory sessions that analyze the effects of group sizes in the voluntary contribution mechanism, when contribution level is either complementary or substitute. The theorical argument is that each production function provides different incentives for the agent along scale...

There is a substantial literature examining coordination in public goods games. We conducted an experiment to explore how varying patterns of thresholds affect the willingness of subjects to contribute to a public good. We had subjects play a multi-period game where each subject was allocated an...

The paper develops a model of repeated interaction between a buyer and a seller, which is then tested via laboratory experiments. The model allows for both formal and informal incentives in the contractual relationship between the parties. Formal incentives are explicit, performance-conditioned...