Cigarettes are experience goods - most of their utility value only gets revealed when one consumes them. We hypothesize a three phase consumer life cycle for experience goods. Consumers initially do not know their utility from the good or their preferences for particular characteristics, and may...

A carbon tax has been widely discussed as a way of reducing fossil fuel use and mitigating climate change, generally in a static framework. Unlike standard goods that can be produced, oil is an exhaustible resource. Parts of its price reflects scarcity rents, i.e., the fact that there is limited...

This paper investigates how increases in concentration can be interrupted or reversed by changes in how firms compete on quality. We examine the U.S. hotel industry during the past half century. We document that starting in the early 1980s, quality competition came more in the form of costs that...

Using data from about seven millions room postings by hotels in France and the UK, we document that, rather than smoothly decreasing to zero, cancellation premia remain positive at roughly 10% to 15% of the full price until two days before the stay. A model where travelers have different...

Agglomeration is a location pattern frequently observed in service industries such as hotels. This paper empirically examines if agglomeration facilitates tacit collusion in the lodging industry using a quarterly dataset of hotels that operated in rural areas across Texas between 2003 and 2005....

Using a sample of highly (over-)leveraged Austrian ski hotels undergoing debt restructurings, we show that reducing a debt overhang leads to a significant improvement in operating performance (return on assets, net profit margin). In particular, a reduction in leverage leads to a decrease in...

Amenities such as good food, attentive staff, and pleasant surroundings may play an important role in hospital demand. We use a marketing survey to measure amenities at hospitals in greater Los Angeles and analyze the choice behavior of Medicare pneumonia patients in this market. We find that...

Standard economic models that guide competition policy imply that demand increases should lead to more, not fewer firms. However, Sutton's (1991) model illustrates that in some cases, demand increases can catalyze competitive responses that bring about shake-outs. This paper provides empirical...

California's per-capita electricity consumption is 50 percent lower than national per-capita consumption. Mild climate, deindustrialization, and its demographics explain part of this differential. California energy efficiency policy is often claimed to be another key factor. A challenge in...

We show that oil production from existing wells in Texas does not respond to price incentives. Drilling activity and costs, however, do respond strongly to prices. To explain these facts, we reformulate Hotelling's (1931) classic model of exhaustible resource extraction as a drilling problem:...