There is a tension between libertarians’ optimism about private supply of public goods and skepticism of the viability of voluntary collusion (Cowen 1992, Cowen and Sutter 1999). Playing off this asymmetry, Cowen (1992) advances the novel argument that the “free market in defense services”...

Empirical scholarship on the standards–trade relationship has been held up due to methodological challenges: measurement, varied effects, and endogeneity. Considering the trade-effects of one particular standard (ISO 9000), we surmount methodological challenges by measuring standardization via...

Empirical scholarship on the standards-trade relationship has been held up due to methodological challenges: measurement, varied effects, and endogeneity. Considering the trade-effects of one particular standard (ISO 9000), we surmount methodological challenges by measuring standardization via...

The paper analyzes the problem of protocol coordination between two firms, where one firm has private information about its own protocol. The institutional characteristics of the market and the class of strategies adopted by the firms admit multiple equilibria in the market. Of these, one...

When there are competing technologies or products with unknown payoffs an important question is which technology will prevail and whether technologies with different payoffs can coexist in the long run. In this paper, we use a social learning model with local interactions to study this question....

International standards have the potential to both promote and hinder international trade. Yet empirical scholarship on the standards-trade relationship has been held up due to some methodological challenges: measurement problems, varied effects, and endogeneity concerns. We are able to surmount...

We show that a private label is an indirect mean to contract on quality in a vertical structure, and is signed by a downstream firm only when its bargaining power is high. When its bargaining power decreases, sharing the fixed cost of quality in a private label with the upstream firm is not...

Private labels (or own-brand products) play a prominent role for consumers in their perception of retailers' reputation. In a model where products are experience goods, a retailer has the opportunity to introduce his own store brand, or to sell a branded product. However, the retailer does only...