In the popularly used ranking method of peer rating, the exclusion of the evaluations/marks given to oneselves is intuitively appealing and has been actually practiced, since a person/university/country typically is biased in favor of itself. This short paper shows that this apparently...

In the paper, an analytical framework with both increasing returns and transaction costs is developed to investigate the general equilibrium with endogenous specialization and division of labor. In this framework, each individual’s optimum decision in choosing her pattern of specialization is...

We investigate whether people are influenced to make investment decisions based on random shock signals and to what extent they do so by exploiting a unique data set from a popular Chinese lottery game with over one million observations. We first present evidence that people, as individual...

This paper develops a formal model with transaction costs and economies of specialisation to address the size of the firm and the level of social division of labour. It is shown that the increase of the level of social division of labour and the decline of firm size may concur, and that the size...

In empirical studies concerning comparison of economic structures and/or structural changes of economies, it is quite useful to employ an aggregate index to describe the structural difference (similarity). This paper offers an axiomatic characterization of the measurement of structural...

In pursuing their plans economic agents regularly have to adjust their pacing of orders, production, and deliveries in unanticipated ways. Information constraints turn many of these adjustments into myopic reactions to accelerations/decelerations observed in the activity level of suppliers...

The implications of the international demonstration effect (IDE) for the development of underdeveloped economies have long been studied and debated. Yet few formal analyses exist in the literature, especially regarding its implications for the growth of domestic markets and the division of...

This paper analyses the effects of inter-market and intra-market income heterogeneities on output and social welfare under uniform pricing and differential pricing regimes by considering a finite number of markets. We first derive the linear demand curve in each market under plausible...