We investigate the sensitivity of consumer surplus estimates to parametric assumptions on individual preference heterogeneity in a discrete choice framework. We compare results from a parametric random coefficients logit model and a recently proposed nonparametric sieve estimator. In particular,...

We examine the implications of pre-grant publication (PP) of patent applications in the context of a cumulative innovation model. We show that pre-grant publication of patents lead to fewer applications and fewer inventions, but it raises the probability that new technologies will reach the...

A government wanting to promote an efficient allocation of resources as measured by the total surplus, should strategically delegate to its competition authority a welfare standard with a bias in favour of consumers. A consumer bias means that some welfare increasing mergers will be blocked....

By using general information structures and precision criteria based on the dispersion of conditional expectations, we study how oligopolists' information acquisition decisions may change the effects of information sharing on the consumer surplus. Sharing information about individual cost...

This paper proposes a framework to model empirically welfare effects that are associated with a price change in a population of heterogeneous consumers. Individual demands are characterized by a nonseparable model which is nonparametric in the regressors, as well as monotonic in unobserved...

Empirical studies showed that many types of network traffic exhibit long-range dependence (LRD),i.e., burstiness on a wide variety of time-scales. Given that traffic streams are indeed endowed withLRD properties, a next question is: what is their impact on network performance? To assess...

We consider a queue fed by a large number, say n, of on-off sources with generally distributed on-and off-times. The queueing resources are scaled by n: the buffer is B=nb and link rate is C=nc.The model is versatile: it allows us to model both long range dependent traffic (by using heavy-tailed...

The paper aims at a conceptual contribution to the normative economic analysis of rural de-velopment (RD) policies. RD is regarded as a problem of interaction between individuals; (lacking) structural change or the (missing) integration of externalities are therefore recon-structed as...

Dieses Diskussionspapier beleuchtet die PRME-Verpflichtung der Hochschule Pforzheim und die daraus resultierenden Probleme (Abschnitt 2) aus vier Perspektiven: der erkenntnistheoretischen (Abschnitt 3), der erfahrungswissenschaftlichen (Abschnitt 4), der juristischen (Abschnitt 5) und einer...