In some markets vertically integrated firms sell directly to final customers but also to independent downstream firms with whom they then compete on the downstream market. It is often argued that resellers intensify competition and benefit consumers, in particular when wholesale prices are...

In our model, an agent produces an outcome by a costly effort and then distributes it among heterogeneous users. The agent's payoff is the weighted sum of the users? shares and the coefficient reflecting their heterogeneity. When the agent neglects users? heterogeneity the game leads to an...

The purpose of this article is to analyze how competitive forces may influence the way media firms like TV channels raise revenue. A media firm can either be financed by advertising revenue, by direct payment from the viewers (or the readers, if we consider newspapers), or by both. We show that...

Durch verschiedene Änderungen der Krankenhausfinanzierung sind Krankenhäuser seit 1993 einem verstärkten wirtschaftlichen Druck ausgesetzt. In einem vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung geförderten Projekt wurde untersucht, ob und in welchen Bereichen die Einführung prospektiver...

The relationship between physician and patient has been discussed intensively in the literature. Nevertheless, they neglect the fact that the production of health not only depends on the medical services supplied by the physician but is also influenced by the patient's compliance. We present a...

Die offiziellen Meldungen des Statistischen Bundesamtes zur Entwicklung der Verbraucherpreise 2007 bestätigten den Eindruck vieler Konsumenten, dass sich der Anstieg der Preise für die Lebenshaltung in letzter Zeit beschleunigt hat. Die ausgewiesene Jahresteuerungsrate von 2,3% entspricht dem...

Neben den tiefgreifenden Veränderungen bei der Stromerzeugung stellt die Energiewende vor allem die Bereiche Stromübertragung und -verteilung vor große Herausforderungen. Notwendige Investitionen in die Netzinfrastruktur führen zu einer Steigerung der Netznutzungsentgelte, die von den...

We examine how people's forecasts for oil or gasoline prices influence their forecasts for broader inflation. We find little evidence from two US household surveys that people over-react to their beliefs about gasoline prices when formulating their forecasts about inflation, with much of the...

Several recent surveys ask for a person's subjective probabilities that the in ation rate falls into various outcome ranges. We provide a new measure of the uncertainty implicit in such probabilities. The measure has several advantages over existing methods: It is robust, trivial to implement,...

Several recent surveys ask for a person's subjective probabilities that the inflation rate falls into various outcome ranges. We provide a new measure of the uncertainty implicit in such probabilities. The measure has several advantages over existing methods: It is robust, trivial to implement,...