Building on the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, recent advances in biosemiotics have resulted into a concise framework for the analysis of signs in living systems. This paper explores the potential for economics and shows how biosemiotics can integrate two different research agendas, each...

Under the regime of Regulation 1/2003 on the implementation of the rules of competition laid down in Articles 101 and 102 TFEU undertakings are obliged to take care by themselves of their compliance with the competition rules. For practical purposes this is also true when it comes to the rules...

This research note empirically investigates whether cash can prevent consumers from making needless purchases in unexpected shopping situations. Cash can have a disciplinary effect on short-term consumption because it imposes a strong temporary budget constraint and also reinforces the pain of...

This paper investigates whether cultural norms shaped by religion drive consumer decisions after a corporate scandal. We exploit the unexpected notice of violation by the US Environmental Protection Agency in September 2015, accusing the car producer Volkswagen (VW) to have used software to...

Consumers increasingly care about firms' ethical conduct (e.g., labor and environmental practices) when making their consumption choices. This note presents a simple framework to highlight the possibility that this development may induce a less desirable production technology choice and bring...

Online platforms provide search tools that help consumers to get better-fitting product offers. But this technology makes consumer search behavior also easily traceable and allows for real-time price discrimination. Consumers face a trade-off: Search intensely and receive a better fit at a...

Abstract Most studies of competition in health care focus on prices and costs, but concerns about quality play a central role in policy debates. If demand is inelastic to quality, then competition may reduce patient welfare. This study uses a dataset of patient registrations for kidney...

Summary This paper examines, whether well prepared report cards affect hospital choice within Germany. We report three main findings. First: hospitals, which publish their quality data voluntarily, extend their market shares after relative to before publishing the quality data - compared to such...

In his book The Socialist Case, first published in 1937, Douglas Jay wrote: ‘in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.’ This phrase became notorious, and,...