This paper examines the relationship between individuals' weight and their employment decisions over the life cycle. I estimate a dynamic stochastic model of individuals' annual joint decisions of occupation, hours worked, and schooling. The model allows body weight to affect non-monetary costs,...

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...

We build a simple model of quantity competition to analyze the effect of switching costs on equilibrium behavior of duopolists. We characterize the industry structure as a function of initial sales of two firms. Contrary to the literature, initial asymmetries persist in our model even though the...

Despite the existence of two vast literatures, very little is known about the potential differences or interactions between search and switching costs. This paper demonstrates the benefits of examining the two frictions in unison. First, the paper shows how subtle distinctions between the two...

Significant attention has been paid to why a durable-goods producer with little or no market power would monopolize the maintenance market for its own product. This paper provides an explanation for this practice that is based on consumer switching costs and the choice of consumers between...

By incorporating the additional existence of switching costs into an oligopoly search model by Stahl (1989), this paper dispels the misleading idea that search costs can simply be treated as a form of switching cost. Due to the assumption that search costs, unlike switching costs, are incurred...

This paper considers a two-period model of market entry with homogeneous products and switching costs. It is shown that the pro-competitive effect of a foreign firm's entry (i.e., unilateral trade liberalization) emerges before the entry. Also, conditions that are conducive to a competitive...

This essay provides an elementary, unified introduction to the impacts of transaction, search and switching costs on resource allocation in competitive markets. The emphasis is on incorporating these phenomena into models of price-taking behavior, rather than the more usual treatments with...

In most liberalised electricity retail markets, incumbent firms still hold the majority of residential consumers. This situation focused the attention of regulatory institutions and energy economists on the determinants of consumers switching decisions. Fewer studies have, however, been devoted...

Indian Farmers continue to suffer regularly from Droughts, as a frequent natural disaster and has profound effect individually and collectively. The mental health effects of natural disaster are well known however anxiety and readiness of likely Drought is less well understood. However, in...