The focus of this study is on black markets which provide an important segment of the parallel economy. These markets operate in disequilibrium,search and information costs become very important.Trafficking in drugs taken as case, to explore both theoretically and empirically. The problem,...

This paper summarizes some of my recent work on consumer protection. I present three theoretical models which illustrate the merits and drawbacks of a number of common consumer protection policies, namely: policies which prevent firms from setting unduly high prices; policies which prevent firms...

Information design is the defining of the requirements governing the selecting, rendering, and transmission of information for the purpose of knowledge transfer as well as the optimization of the information with respect to these requirements. In the case of econymic information, the knowledge...

Web sites invest significant resources in trying to influence their visibility in online search results. We study the economic incentives of Web sites to invest in this process known as search engine optimization. We focus on methods that improve sites' ranking among the search results without...

We investigate three ways in which firms can become "prominent" and thereby influence the order in which consumers consider options. First, firms can affect an intermediary's sales efforts by means of commission payments. When firms pay commission to a salesman, the salesman promotes the product...

This paper describes how state-of-the-art methods of choice modeling can be used to analyze consumer choice behavior in "competitive" health insurance markets. I use the insurance choices of senior citizens in the U.S. as an example. I then consider the issue of whether consumers benefit when we...

A fundamental question in pharmaceutical marketing management is: How does the effectiveness of detailing change when additional information on drugs is revealed via patients' experiences during the product lifecycle? To address this question, we develop a model of detailing and prescribing...

In this paper we discuss the necessity of models including complex adaptive systems in order to eliminate the shortcomings of neoclassical models based on equilibrium theory. A simulation model containing artificial adaptive agents is used to explore the dynamics of a market of highly...

For several decades public enterprises have been criticised for their poor economic performance. Many economists take it as “conventional wisdom” that publicly owned enterprises are inefficient by their very nature. This seemed to be proved by what is probably the most cited survey...

The observed two-part tariff price structure (consisting of a lump-sum price and a linear marginal price) for drinking water in Germany does not reflect the cost structure reported in the literature. Recovering marginal costs from a sample of 251 German counties, we see that there are positive...