This paper studies how market competition influences the algorithmic design choices of firms in the context of targeting. Firms face the general trade-off between bias and variance when choosing the design of a supervised learning algorithm in terms of model complexity or the number of...

Persistent shifts in equilibria are likely to arise in oligopolistic markets and may be detrimental to the measurement of conduct, related markups and intensity of competition. We develop a cointegrated VAR (vector autoregression) based approach to detect long-run changes in conduct when data...

Empirical studies show that competition in the credit markets has important effects on the entry and growth of firms in nonfinancial industries. This paper explores the hypothesis that the availability of credit at the time of a firm’s founding has a profound effect on that firm’s nature. I...

We find that competition from payday lenders leads depository institutions to raise overdraft fees and reduce the availability of “free” checking accounts. We attribute this rise in prices partly to adverse selection created by banks’ practice of charging a flat fee regardless of the...

Competition among trading platforms has considerably reduced trading fees in stock markets. We show that this evolution is not necessarily beneficial to investors. Obviously it increases gains from trade when a trade happens. Less obviously, it can induce investors to post limit orders with a...

Firm heterogeneity is mostly discussed in the literature from the viewpoint of productivity differential. In contrast this paper recognizes wealth heterogeneity as an important factor that results in firm heterogeneity. The issue of wealth heterogeneity and export incentive through credit market...

To explore the rationality and competitiveness of the mutual fund industry, we analyze the alpha of active and index mutual funds from a global sample of more than 60,000 equity and fixed income funds and test the null hypothesis that alphas to investors are zero. We distinguish between...