There is growing evidence that low-quality customer service prevails in the mobile telecommunications industry. In this paper we provide theoretical support to this empirical observation by using simple game theoretical models where inefficient low-quality service levels are part of an...

Credit card offers have grown increasingly complex over time. Using a straightforward measure of complexity — the total number of numeric figures that appear on a credit card direct mail offer's Schumer Box — this research studies changes in card offer complexity. The general structure and...

There is growing evidence that low-quality customer service prevails in the mobile telecommunications industry. In this paper we provide theoretical support to this empirical observation by using simple game theoretical models where inefficient low-quality service levels are part of an...

Ultimatum games have been extensively used in experimental studies. By studying the consequences that restrictions shared by ultimatum games have in subject's behaviour, this paper argues that some results are falsified by design constraints. This paper also presents a taxonomy of certification,...

This paper revisits the tragedy of the commons when agents have different capabilities in both production and encroachment activities, and can allocate their time between them. Under fairly general assumptions on production and encroachment technologies, an individual's expected income is convex...

The quantity-setting (Cournot) oligopoly with perfect complements is dual to the price-setting (Bertrand) oligopoly with homogeneous goods. Under mild technical conditions, the former setting has a unique (pure strategy) Nash equilibrium with null quantities

Cartels are inherently instable. Each cartelist is best off if it breaks the cartel, while the remaining firms remain loyal. If firms interact only once, if products are homogenous, if firms compete in price, and if marginal cost is constant, theory even predicts that strategic interaction...

Providing public goods is hard, because providers are best off free-riding. Is it even harder if one group's public good is a public bad for another group or, conversely, gives the latter a windfall profit? We experimentally study public goods provision embedded in a social context and find that...

We investigate the possibility of using public firms to regulate polluting emissions in a Cournot oligopoly where production takes place at constant returns to scale and entails a negative environmental externality. We model the problem as a differential game and investigate (i) the Cournot-Nash...

In this paper, we investigate the optimal taxation policy in a differential oligopoly game where the competing firms share the access to a productive renewable resource. We show that, in a linear Feedback Nash Equilibrium of the game, a linear Markov tax, imposed on the output, and specified as...