The oil industry is the richest and most influential industry in the world. The industry has moved the fates of nations. Oil is required to fight wars and exert power, and the restriction of this energy source is paramount to the restriction of movement, control, and in the end, power....

In various forms, economists are still taking sustained action to find specific answers to questions related to the issue of economic fluctuations. In this context of continuing concerns, both the "old" classics and the "new" classics have made substantial progress in their own theories of the...

Academicians and practitioners are becoming increasingly interested inthe economics of Information Technology (IT). In part, this intereststems from the increased role that IT now plays in the strategicthinking of most large organizations, and from the significant dollarcosts expended by these...

The central motivation for assembling the contributions in this Handbook on the Knowledge Economy derives from the observation that many in government and business seem to have taken up the challenge of putting in place whatever is needed for a knowledge-based economy or a knowledge-based...

Hamilton (2001) makes a number of comments on our paper (Harding and Pagan, 2002b). The objectives of this rejoinder are, firstly, to note the areas in which we agree; secondly, to define with greater clarity the areas in which we disagree; and, thirdly, to point to other papers, including a longer...

There are many situations in which individuals have a choice of whether or not to observe the eventual outcome. In these instances, individuals often prefer to avoid observing the outcome. The standard von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) Expected Utility model cannot accommodate these cases, since it...

This dissertation addresses a basic difficulty in accommodating other-regarding preferences within existing models of decision making. Decision makers with such preferences may violate the property of stochastic dominance that is shared by both expected utility and almost any model of...

This dissertation consists of three essays concerning entrepreneurship, venture capital and monetary economics. It takes time for a venture capitalist to find a project in which to invest, to implement projects and to cash out. Further, capitalists and entrepreneurs are uncertain about whom they...

The dissertation consists of four chapters. The first chapter presents a model that incorporates product market competition into the standard neoclassical framework. The model explains why value-maximizing firms conduct mergers that appear to lower shareholder value. In a Cournot setting, the...

This dissertation considers the determinants of individual careers within firms and it is articulated into two chapters. The first chapter analyzes a learning model in which a firm and a worker can acquire information about the worker's ability by observing his performance at different tasks....