I study a market model in which profit-maximizing firms compete in multi-dimensional pricing strategies over a consumer, who is limited in his ability to grasp such complicated objects and therefore uses a sampling procedure to evaluate them. Firms respond to increased competition with an...

A market model is presented, in which firms and consumers differ in their market understanding. In the model, rational firms compete in probability distributions over consumers with bounded ability to grasp statistical data. Increased competition causes firms to increase their effort to...

Ongoing demographic change will lead to a relative scarcity of raw labor to the effect that output growth will be decreasing in the next decades, a secular stagnation. As physical capital will be relatively abundant, this decrease of output will be accompanied by reductions of asset returns. We...

This paper proposes a method for the welfare analysis of pay-as-you-go social security systems. We derive a formula for the welfare consequences of a permanent marginal change in the payroll tax rate that is valid under weak assumptions about the deep structure of the economy. Our approach...

A well‐established result in the literature is that Social Security reduces steady state welfare in a standard life cycle model. However, less is known about the historical quantitative effects of the program on agents who were alive when the program was adopted. In a computational life cycle...