By now, almost every business has an internet presence, and is likely engaged in e-commerce. What are the major risks perceived by those engaged in e-commerce and electronic payment systems? What potential risks, if they become reality, may cause substantial increases in operating costs or...

Global Recession to Global Recovery: It is well known fact that all good things, as also bad things, come to an end and business cycles pass through good and bad economic times. Economically 2010 was a year of transition from economic recession to recovery. Economies were improving in some...

To analyze the opioid epidemic, we construct a model where individuals, with and without pain, choose whether to misuse opioids knowing the probabilities of addiction and dying. These odds are functions of opioid use. Markov chains are estimated from the US data for the college and non–college...

Advances in information technology have fundamentally altered how we make decisions, as well as the range of alternative options we might consider when deciding. From fairly trivial decisions to important ones, our decisions are increasingly informed by online expert or “crowd-sourced”...

The "retirement saving puzzle" in the literature is the phenomenon that many households in the U.S. have significant wealth late in life, contrary to the predictions of a simple life-cycle model. In this project, we examine cross-country differences in saving behavior of retirees in order to...

The availability of quantity information along with expenditure information in some household surveys allows the estimation of price reactions on the basis of unit values. We compare two specifications that have been proposed in this context by Deaton (1990) and Crawford et al. (1997) in order...

In this paper, we derive several alternative pricing schemes to allocate worldwide taxation burden to reduce carbon emissions. We compare traditional allocation schemes with an optimal Ramsey pricing by applying the outcome of modeling heterogeneous consumer behavior across countries. Using...

To operate effectively in global markets, marketing managers need to understand that consumer response to globalization may be more complex than is commonly assumed. We examine a proposed conceptual framework to describe consumers' responses to globalization through a cross-national survey on...

In the context of the WTO, intellectual property rights (IPR) are codified in the TRIPS-agreement. While covering all the different types of IPR, landmark cases of the still young history of TRIPS have dealt with commercial copyrights. This paper summarizes the basic economics of the IPR branch...