We propose a formal way to systematically study the differential effects of exogenous shocks in economic models with heterogeneous agents. Our setting applies to models that can be rephrased as "competition for market shares" in a broad sense. We show that even in presence of any number of...

Using an empirical framework derived from models of nonlinear pricing, we estimate the degree of quality degradation in cable television markets. We find lower bounds on quality degradation ranging from 11% to 45% of observed service qualities. Furthermore, cable operators in markets with local...

This paper studies optimal nonlinear pricing for a monopolist when consumers' preferences exhibit temptation and self-control as in Gul and Pesendorfer (2001a). Consumers are subject to temptation inside the store but exercise self-control, and those foreseeing large self-control costs do not...

Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing schemes are popular in certain industries and not others. We model the seller's choice of pricing scheme under various market structures assuming consumers share their surplus. We show that the profitability and popularity of PWYW depend not only on consumers'...

This paper analyses whether scale economies exists in the UK telecommunications industry. The approach employed differs from other UK studies in that panel data for a range of companies is used. This increases the number of observations and thus allows potentially for more robust tests for...

We analyze self- and joint procurement of countries with heterogeneous demand for a good offered by a price discriminating monopolist. We find that not only countries with low but also with high demand can benefit from committing to jointly procure equal quantities at a uniform price, even if...

The paper studies the use of emission taxes and feed-in subsidies for the regulation of a monopoly that can produce the same good with a technology that employs a polluting input and a clean technology. The second-best tax and subsidy are calculated solving a two-stage policy game between the...

In a seminal 1972 paper, Robert M. May asked: "Will a Large Complex System Be Stable?" and argued that stability (of a broad class of random linear systems) decreases with increasing complexity, sparking a revolution in our understanding of ecosystem dynamics. Twenty-five years later, May,...

The issue of the impact of trade on specialisation structures and the effects of trade liberalisation on employment and labour markets has been intensively discussed in the recent literature on trade liberalisation and globalisation. In Europe this debate has gained new momentum in the...

This paper examines multi-battle contests whose extensive form can be represented in terms of a finite state machine. We start by showing that any contest that satisfies our assumptions decomposes into two phases, a principal phase (in which states cannot be revisited) and a concluding...