This paper studies price competition between experts and discounters in a market for credence goods. While experts can identify a consumer’s problem by exerting costly but unobservable diagnosis effort, discounters just sell treatments without giving any advice. The unobservability of...

This article studies the use of different distribution channels as an instrument of price discrimination in credence goods markets. In credence goods markets, where consumers do not know which quality of the good or service they need, price discrimination proceeds along the dimension of quality...

The term Systemic Risk belongs to the standard rhetoric of economic policy discussions related to the banking industry. Besides of the goal of protecting small depositors control of systemic risk is given as one of the main arguments for banking regulation. Various recent financial crises have...

As it has rightfully been recognized by China's central government, successful urbanization will be decisive for the nation's future development. Key challenges will be to realize urbanization economies, improve production and innovation capabilities, direct urban and suburban growth and improve...

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocation reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the...

We introduce a fairly general licensing model with an endogenous industry structure - in terms of number of active firms - and general licensing contracts. We show that when the patentee can employ contracts that can condition on market entry or price, it can implement an outcome that yields...

Maternal sugar consumption in utero may have a variety of effects on offspring. We exploit the abolishment of the rationing of sweet confectionery in the UK on April 24, 1949, and its subsequent reintroduction some months later, in an era of otherwise uninterrupted rationing of confectionery...

The spectrum for third generation (3G) mobile communications for the German market was alloted to operators by means of an auction. This resulted in a highly competitive outcome: six operators were given rights to provide 3G services. Government revenues from this auction were a staggering EUR...

This paper considers a housing market with price restrictions. On such market, price equilibrium may be excluded for certain preference profiles. However, the existence of a unique minimal rationing price equilibrium has previously been established on a general preference domain that contains...

This paper studies a large class of imperfectly discriminating contests, referred to as elastic contests, that induce players to either overbid a standing bid or to abstain from bidding altogether. Many common forms of contest are elastic. In any equilibrium of an elastic contest, there is...