A recent strand of the economic literature has emphasised the role of services, and in particular knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), as a primary source of knowledge creation and diffusion. Since this transferring process often occurs through strong face-to-face interactions, the role...

From the viewpoint of an innovator a patent is a tradeoff between the right to exclude others from using the patented matter versus the requirement to disclose it. Given the sequential nature of many innovations, patent induced technology diffusion can spur technological progress. However,...

An optimal selection of production and services company suppliers is one of the most important processes of the top management. According to ISO 9001:2015 developed for Quality Management System the type and range of control to be applied to the outsourced process can be influenced by many...

We model competition for a multi-attribute service, like health care services, where consumers observe attribute quality imprecisely before deciding on a provider. High quality in one attribute is more important in terms of ex post utility. Attribute quality is stochastic, providers can shift...

Traditional business models of credit rating agencies (CRAs) are criticized for creating incentives for misreporting. This paper investigates a potential alternative in which CRAs receive revenue from advertisement only. We use a two-period Bayesian reputation model and show that CRAs will shirk...

A recent strand of the literature shows that the adoption of different lending technologies is associated with heterogeneous credit policies and performance. Using a unique Bank of Italy?s survey, specifically designed to capture some organizational features and the lending techniques adopted by...

Including the entry decision in a Bertrand model with imperfectly informed consumers, we introduce a trade-off at the level of social welfare. On the one hand, market transparency is beneficial when the number of firms is exogenously given. On the other, a higher degree of market transparency...

This paper highlights the strategic role of private quality standards in vertical relations. Considering two symmetric downstream firms that are exclusively supplied by a finite number of upstream firms, we show that there exist asymmetric equilibria in the downstream firms' quality...

We use a new dataset on the Swiss newspaper industry from 1999 to 2008 to estimate the substitution patterns between free newspapers and traditional media. Our identification strategy exploits the timing of free newspaper entry and allows for confounding trends. We find that the entry of free...