The paper analyses the impact of the relatively belated move to professionalism in Rugby Union. We use data on match attendance for 3,667 fixtures in European club Rugby over 15 seasons to estimate the effect of competitive balance on attendance. We find that (short- and medium-term) competitive...

The paper presents an experiment testing the hypothesis that, if consumers do not have well defined preferences and as a result their valuation of a new product is shaped by past experiences of prices, it may be more profitable for firms to follow a strategy of pricing high and then lower. We...

There is a well-established literature on separately testing the prediction power of different betting market settings. This paper provides an inter-market comparison of the forecasting accuracy between bookmakers and a major betting exchange. Employing a dataset covering all football matches...

The attention market involves competition in which platforms acquire time from consumers, with bundles of content and ads, and sell ads to marketers to deliver messages during that time. This paper shows that the attention market solves a transaction-cost problem that prevents efficient exchange...

The Rule of Reason, which has come to dominate modern antitrust law, allows defendants the opportunity to justify their conduct by demonstrating “procompetitive” effects. Seizing the opportunity, defendants have begun offering increasingly numerous and creative explanations for their...

In this paper, we investigate the relation between business profit and the demand price-elasticity of consumers. Business profit increases with a decrease in customer price-sensitivity only when the relation between a firm's net operating margin (after fixed-costs) and its price-cost margin...

This paper has two major goals. The first is to propose an evaluation of the economic weight of the sexual recreation industry in Italy. To achieve this goal data from different sources have been collected, and in some cases estimated when studies on specific topics were not available. The...

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (A.O. Hirschman 1970) is a theoretical concept derived from the work of Albert O. Hirschman (1970) which is focused on two essential options in organizatios and products decline, being exit and voice.The basis concept is as follows: members of an organization, whether...

We examine how retailers discount the prices of product systems versus their constituent components. The topic is important because such systems are ubiquitous in our daily lives. In particular, many high-tech markets revolve around complex multi-component systems – e.g. a camera system...

The ongoing discourse about COVID-19 testing revolves around undertesting (i.e., insufficient testing capacity relative to demand). An important yet little studied systematic issue is overdiagnosis (i.e., positive diagnoses for patients with negligible viral loads): recent evidence shows U.S....