In a market environment with random detection of product quality, a firm can employ umbrella branding as a strategy to convince consumers of the high quality of its products. Alternatively, a firm can rely on external certification of the quality of one or both of its products. We characterize...

The market for copyrights is characterised by a highly skewed distribution of profits: very few movies, books and songs generate huge profits, whereas the great bulk barely manages to recover production cost. At the moment when the owner of intellectual property grants a licence ("ex ante"),...

In a market environment with random detection of product quality, a firm can employ umbrella branding as a strategy to convince consumers of the high quality of its products. Alternatively, a firm can rely on external certification of the quality of one or both of its products. We characterize...

Should the European Union grant state aid through an institution like the European Investment bank? This paper evaluates the efficiency of different measures for grant-ing state aid. We use a theoretical model with firms that differ in their creditworthiness and compare different types of...

We claim that understanding human decisions requires that both automatic and deliberate processes be considered. First, we sketch the qualitative differences between two hypothetical processing systems, an automatic and a deliberate system. Second, we show the potential that connectionism offers...

The paper develops a version of Pontryagin's maximum principle for optimal control problems with monotonicity constraints on control variables. Whereas the literature handles such constraints by imposing an assumption of piecewise smoothness on the control variable and treating the slope of this...

In this paper, the implicit and explicit conceptualizations of international organizations found in the three major theories of international relations are outlined and compared. It turns out that in a neorealist framework, international organizations can be explained; however, they exhibit no...

Classic behavioral decision research has intensively explored deliberate processes in decision making. Accordingly, individuals are viewed as bounded rational actors who, because of cognitive limitations, use simple heuristics that are successful in certain environments. In this chapter, it is...