The traditional argument that shorter product cycles favor trade secret over patenting is reviewed. A game theoretic model provides an argument that shorter product cycles can induce firms to file more patent applications. The firms may be trapped in a prisoners' dilemma where all firms would...

In the classical literature of innovation-based endogenous growth, the main engine of long run economic growth is firm entry. Nevertheless, when projects are heterogeneous, and good ideas are scarce, a mass-composition trade off is introduced into this link: larger cohorts are characterized by a...

Given a world consisting of two countries, two commodities, and two consumers, this paper analyzes the potential effects of the current global trend of shifting world productions with regards to consumer goods. When technological improvements occur in a developing country, would terms of trade...

This paper shows, using a simple model, that wasteful innovations may result in a loss-loss situation where no country experiences an increase in welfare. If some countries introduce innovations that result in harmful effects on other countries, it may cause the adversely affected countries to...

One of the most conspicuous features of mergers is that they come in waves that are correlated with increases in share prices and price/earnings ratios. We use a natural way to discriminate between pure stock market influences on firm decisions and other influences by examining merger patterns...

Contractual and regulatory provisions for access affect incentives to invest in an upgraded network and, in particular, a next-generation access network. Investment decisions are made under uncertainty and have to be made over time. This papers provides a framework for taking uncertainty, risk...

This paper is a study of the shape and structure of the distribution of prices at which an identical good is sold in a given market and time period. We find that the typical price distribution is symmetric and leptokurtic, with a standard deviation between 19% and 36%. Only 10% of the variance...

This paper studies a class of continuous-time stochastic games in which the actions of a long-run player have a persistent effect on payoffs. For example, the quality of a firm's product depends on past as well as current effort, or the level of a policy instrument depends on a government's past...

I study how the persistence of past choices can be used to create incentives in a continuous time stochastic game in which a large player, such as a firm, interacts with a sequence of short-run players, such as customers. The long-run player faces moral hazard and her past actions are...

We examine the relation between consumer search and equilibrium prices when collusion is endogenously determined. We develop a theoretical model and show that average price is a U-shaped function of the measure of searchers: prices are highest when there are no searchers (local monopoly power)...