With the availability of new techniques to close wine bottles avoiding the risk of “corky” taste the tradition of closing wine bottles with cork stoppers is on the retreat. As a consequence the Mediterranean cork oak forests with their rich biodiversity are endangered since their cultivation...

Product information which is beneficial for an individual consumer may hurt if disseminated widely. Even with rational expectations a fallacy of composition may occur if information leads to demand and price increases

A survey in random-selected supermarkets in Beijing, the capital city of China, is reported to identify the attitudes and perceptions of consumers toward green-labeled milk, as well as their willingness to pay (WTP) for it, and to determine the factors that affect their WTP. The study reveals...

This paper provides an analysis of the social consequences of people seeking to keep up with the Joneses. All individuals attempt to reach a higher rank than the Joneses, including the Joneses themselves. This attitude gives rise to an equilibrium in which all individuals have equal utilities...

We compare the private and social incentives for privacy when sellers can commit to transparent privacy policies that are understood by consumers. The purpose is to establish a baseline for how well markets perform when firms' privacy policies are common knowledge. In this setting, if the market...

This article summarizes and draws connections among diverse streams of theoretical and empirical research on the economics of privacy. We focus on the economic value and consequences of protecting and disclosing personal information, and on consumers' understanding and decisions regarding the...

Independent of the left-right model of ideological structure, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food and agriculture are resented across the political spectrum in Switzerland. In the absence of any real experience with genetically modified (GM) food but faced with continuous exposure to...

A core proposition in economics is that voluntary exchanges benefit both parties. We show that people often deny the mutually beneficial nature of exchange, instead using zero-sum thinking. Participants read about simple exchanges of goods and services, judging whether each party to the...

This paper investigates a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about the underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and - potentially - shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the...

This paper takes advantage of a natural experiment to examine the relationship between the price and saliency of health services. A large employer e-mailed individually-targeted health education encouraging high-value care to high-risk employees. Weeks before the program launched, a company...