This paper examines the effect of HMO market development on hospital utilization in short term general hospitals in the U.S. between 1985 and 1993. HMO penetration does not explain the majority or even a substantial minority of the variation in hospital utilization. Among seven measures of...

We present a model of fixing or patching a software problem after the product has been released in the market. Specifically, we model a software firm's trade-off in releasing a buggy product early and investments in fixing it later. Just as the marginal cost of producing software can be...

Conventional wisdom once held that the demand for addictive substances like cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs was unlike that for any other economic good and, therefore, unresponsive to traditional market forces. Recently, however, researchers from two disparate fields, economics and behavioral...