Consumers often incur costs when switching from one product to another. Recently there has been renewed debate within the literature about whether these switching costs lead to higher prices. We build a theoretical model of dynamic competition and solve it analytically for a wide range of...

A small proportion of high growth firms create the majority of all new jobs. For policymakers, it is important to know (1) the obstacles faced by high growth firms are and (2) the obstacles faced by firms with the potential to achieve high growth, but which are yet to achieve this. This...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the agency relationship between the public sector and small firms targeted for assistance by examining micro and macro data for a cross section of eligible women business enterprises (WBEs). Using hedonic sales and employment indices we find that...

This paper studies information acquisition under competitive pressure and proposes a model to examine the relationship between product market competition and the level of innovative activity in an industry. Recent empirical papers point to an inverted-U shape relationship between competition and...

As business-to-business commerce shifts to the Internet, newer suppliers with cheaper but unreliable technologies enter the market place to win orders from firms by beating the price of their perfectly reliable (but expensive) competitors. The dilemma facing purchasing firms is the allocation of...

The bulk of the global innovative effort takes place in 5 countries: USA, Japan and China as leaders, with France and United Kingdom as immediate followers, which all display, on the long run, a negative marginal value added on innovation. The present paper attempts to answer the following...

The application of Nash bargaining solution to profit division in negotiation between opencast lignite mine and power plant has been discussed. Different proposals of status quo point usage and ways of its determination for profit sharing both in strategic and tactical/operational negotiation...

Different structures of lignite mines and power stations, which have appeared on the Polish market as a result of its transformation and the privatisation, were discussed. The attention is focused on the fact that the practice is overtaking the theory because there is lack of models of...

For methods of the profit division in the bilateral monopoly of the mine and the power station sug-gested in the first part of this paper the formulae for lignite price and shares in the joint profit of the mine and the power station are calculated. The proposed profit division contain: the...

Consumers often have to decide whether to go to a remote store for a lower price. Only the absolute price difference between the stores should be relevant in this case, but several experiments showed that people exhibit "relative thinking": they are affected also by the relative savings...