This paper extends Hotelling's model of price competition with quadratic transportation costs from a line to graphs. I propose an algorithm to calculate firm-level demand for any given graph, conditional on prices and firm locations. One feature of graph models of price competition is that...

There are two important reasons for consumers to spend gift certificates differently than gifts in cash or non-gift income: a) they are forced to change their shopping pattern because of the conditions imposed by the issuer of the certificates, or b) they purposely separate gift certificates...

Empirical studies of labor markets show that social contacts are an important source of job-related information [Ioannides and Loury (2004)]. At the same time, wage differences among workers may be explained only in part by differences in individual background characteristics. Such findings...

In the last decade, many European countries have seen a sharp increase in the number of automated fueling stations. We study the effect of this process innovation on prices at stations that are automated and their competitors using a difference-in-differences matching strategy. Our estimates...

How to engage workers in conservation efforts when the company pays the bill? In a field experiment with 409 bus drivers, we investigate the potential of targeted peer-comparison feedback and on-the-road coaching. Drivers receive individualized reports with peer-comparison messages on multiple...

The common view that buyer power of insurers may effectively counteract provider market power critically rests on the idea that consumers and insurers have a joint interest in extracting price concessions. However, in markets where the buyer is an insurer, the interests of insurers and consumers...

In this paper we identify the lines along which social ties between high-school teenagers are primarily formed. To this end, we introduce interaction weights between pupils in the same school class that are a function of exogenous individual background characteristics, such as gender, ethnicity,...

In the Dutch Postcode Lottery a postal code (19 households on average) is randomly selected weekly, and prizes - consisting of cash and a new BMW - are awarded to lottery participants living in that postal code. On average, this generates a temporary, unexpected income shock equal to about eight...

Consumption rivalry generates variation in the choice sets individual decision-makers face. When such variation is not taken into account, biased estimates of demand result. Researchers however often lack exact information on temporal variation in product availability and necessarily limit...

This chapter discusses several important topics related to randomization in field experiments. In the field, researchers face constraints in the design they can implement and/or the type of data that can be collected. The chapter looks at such constraints from the point of view of randomization....