Unlike most businesses, firms in a sports league need viable competitors. While a certain amount of domination is optimal, from an individual owners perspective, too much will result in league dissolution, and thus a lower utility for every owner. Hence, there is a limited positive production...

he sociological literature on social networks emphasizes by and large positive network effects. Negative effects of such networks are discussed rather rarely. This paper tackles negative effects by applying economic theory, particularly neoclassical theory, new institutional theory and the...

Previous studies find that some social groups are stuck in poverty traps because of network effects. However, these studies do not carefully analyze how these groups overcome low human capital investment activities. Unlike previous studies, the model in this paper includes network externalities...

The rivalry between developers of open source and proprietary software encourages open source developers to court users and respond to their needs. If the open source developer wants to promote her own open source standard and solutions, she may choose liberal license terms such as those of the...

According to the hypothesis of planned obsolescence, a durable goods monopolist without commitment power has an excessive incentive to introduce new products that make old units obsolete, and this reduces its overall profitability. In this paper, I reconsider the above hypothesis by examining...

The regulation of vertical relationships between firms is the subject of persistent legal and academic controversy. The literature studying vertical trade relationships seems to assume that an upstream monopolist prefers downstream competition over exclusive distribution arrangements. We derive...

In this paper, we construct a simplified general oligopolistic equilibrium (GOLE) model, in which Smith's (1776) famous theory of division of labor is embedded. In the absence of labor market integration with trading countries, we show that trade liberalization promotes a reduction of the number...

This paper incorporates the efficiency wage model of Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984) into a general oligopolistic equilibrium model of Neary (2009). We show that the pro-competitive effect stemming from trade liberalization increases the real wage of employees and relaxes the non-shirking condition....

This paper studies how cross-sector strategic trade policy affects wages, country-wide profits, and welfare. I develop a simple model of two-country continuum-of-sectors general oligopolistic equilibrium. Demands are linear and sectors involve one domestic firm competing on quantity with its...

This paper builds a general oligopolistic equilibrium model to investigate how within-sector firm heterogeneities affect wage rate, country-wide profits, and welfare. Using linear inverse demands, I consider asymmetric sectors, each involving n Cournot oligopolists producing horizontally...