This article surveys the Catholic Church's exploitation of sport in Liberal (1861–1922), Fascist (1922–1943), and post-war Italy. It examines how and why the Church overcame its initial reticence to embrace sport and turn it into a fundamental pillar of an alternative culture that challenged...

This paper studies observational learning in a consumer search environment. In our model, consumers observe the purchasing decision of a predecessor before deciding which rm to visit. We show that if consumers emulate their predecessor and initiate their search at the rm she purchased from, a...

Although (or because) it is uncommon to observe consumers bargaining at retail stores in the Western world, the circumstances under which retail rms are actually willing to bargain is largely unknown. We construct a theoretical model in order to better understand how price and rm characteristics...

The well-known double marginalization problem understates the inefficiencies arising from vertical relations in consumer search markets where consumers are uninformed about the wholesale prices charged by manufacturers to retailers. Con- sumer search provides a monopoly manufacturer with an...

I show that the equilibrium derived in Gravelle and Sivey (2010) cannot hold for rational consumers. I then partially characterize the continuum of possible equilibria for rational consumers.

I show that marginal cost asymmetry has important implications for search models. In several widely used search models with mixed strategy equilibria, excluding some special cases, firms with different marginal costs cannot randomize prices in the same interval. So, even a small asymmetry in...

We show that the Bertrand oligopoly model with cost asymmetries may admit multiple Nash equilibria when firms hold passive ownership stakes in each other. The equilibrium price may be as high as the monopoly price of the most efficient firm.

This paper proposes a two-good model of price competition, where some consumers visit all shops and others visit only one. We find that information frictions lead to price dispersion. When the two goods are complements, their prices will tend to be negatively correlated, so if one is priced...

In Rome, if you start digging, chances are you will nd things. We consider a famous complaint that justies the underdeveloped Roman metro system: \if we tried to build a new metro line, it would probably be stopped by archeological nds that are too valuable to destroy, so we would have wasted...