Using machine learning techniques applied to consumer diary survey data, the author of this working paper examines methods for studying consumer payment choice. These techniques, especially when paired with regression analyses, provide useful information for understanding and predicting the...

We investigate firms' outsourcing decisions when production requires a large number of inputs. The novelty of our approach is that it provides a testable framework to characterize the equilibrium fraction of outsourced inputs. We demonstrate that intensified competition in a Cournot market for...

This paper develops behavioral and deterministic overlapping generations models to explain and simulate changes in the proportion of secular and religious people. Under the behavioral approach, the role of the church is to generate an externality associated with the investment in enhancing the...

The paper investigates the consequences of code-sharing agreements among airline firms competing on international routes, where some passengers interconnect to flights originating or terminating at cities not served by foreign airlines. The authors calculate the precise market share captured by...

I develop a dynamic asymmetric information model where a domestic producer is unable to commit to producing a high-quality product. The domestic producer then can signal to consumers that it is producing a high-quality product by developing the infrastructure needed to start exporting the...

This article presents a model of two firms with fixed budgets that simultaneously hire lobbyists to obtain exclusive contracts in multiple markets. In a pure-strategy equilibrium, neither firm can increase its payoff by using its reserves to hire more lobbyists in any market. Efficiency...

We analyze differentiated retail industries where shops engage in two-stage competition with respect to opening hours and prices. We explore the effects of consumers' shopping time flexibility by comparing bi-directional consumers with forward- or backward-oriented consumers, who can either...

Alternating-offers bargaining procedures generate two types of surplus: (i) shares of the pie that is divided according to the assumed bargaining mechanism, and (ii) surpluses that are generated by the first-mover advantage. Most existing literature focuses on the first surplus but ignores the...

Hotelling's model, commonly referred to as the "linear city" model, is perhaps the most widely-used model of competition in differentiated products. However, pure-strategy Nash equilibria in prices do not exist unless the firms are located either sufficiently far apart from each other or at the...

For more than three decades, average college tuition in the United State has risen at rates far in excess of inflation. This article constructs a simple analytical model to analyze how competing colleges adjust their tuition and enrollment levels when student loans become more affordable....