This report documents a blockchain application developed for the real estate sector. The application enables distributed workflow management in a complicated transaction process: the selling of a share of stocks in a housing corporation. As its core element, the application utilizes...

The conventional antitrust wisdom is that the formation of patent pools is welfare en- hancing when patents are complementary, since the pool avoids a double-marginalization problem associated with independent licensing. The focus of this paper is on (down- stream) product development and...

In markets for experience or credence goods adverse selection can drive out higher quality products and services. This negative implication of asymmetric information about product quality for trading and welfare, poses the question of how such markets first originate. We consider a market in...

The aim of this article is to investigate the impacts of cooperative and non-cooperative R&D strategies on product innovation and firm performance. Based on the industrial economics literature and the optimisation model, R&D competition, R&D cartelisation, and full industry cartelisation...

The gender pay gap (GPG) remains a persistent phenomenon in contemporary labor markets. Despite a vast body of research examining its causes, as of today, unequal labor market power resources between men and women have remained an underappreciated factor in the literature. Drawing on the...

We investigate experimentally on eBay how sellers set prices in "Buy-It-Now" (BIN) auctions. We find that the eBay format leads to prices substantially below those expected in second-price auctions. Moreover, our results reveal that the information available on eBay about buyer experience and...

Being able to manage growth, improve results, change behavioral attitudes and innovate are legitimate aspirations in the search for an improved performance, even though they are not the only ones. At the beginning, it was believed that productive specialization and scale would be sufficient to...

Part 1 of the report provides an overview of the position of energy-intensive industries in Romania as compared to other Central and East European economies. The industries identified as particularly 'energy-intensive' are the paper industry, the chemical, the non-metallic mineral products and...

Several years after the global slump, the construction industry and many countries and sectors with construction-related activities and firms tied to them still feel the impact of that financial and economic crisis. In contrast, several years prior to the crisis, there had been a major...

This paper examines an industry whose economic activity uses a natural capital on which its profit also relies. When such a productive natural capital has a limited capacity to recover from its exploitation, a free market tends to over-exploit it, calling for public intervention. The analysis is...