We document the evolution of productivity in a steel mini mill with fixed capital, producing an unchanged product with Leontief technology. Despite almost un- changed production conditions, output doubles within the sample period (12 years). We decompose the gains into: downtime reductions, more...

We consider the interaction between an incumbent firm and a potential entrant, and examine how this interaction is affected by demand fluctuations. Our model gives rise to procyclical entry, prices, and price-cost margins, although the average price in the market can be countercyclical if the...

This paper reviews the Israeli credit card industry and discusses in detail the ongoing attempts by the Israeli Antitrust Authority (IAA) to promote competition in the industry. Currently, these attempts had only limited success: there is still little competition both on the issuing and the...

Programmers can distribute new software to online users either for a feeas shareware or bundle it with advertising banners and distribute it forfree as adware. In this paper we study the programmers' choice betweenthese two modes of distribution in the context of a model that takeexplicit...

We construct a comprehensive panel data of 96 publicly traded European utilities over the period 1994-2005 in order to study the relationship between the capital structure of regulated firms, regulated prices, and investments, and examine if and how this interaction is affected by ownership...

This paper shows how competing firms can facilitate tacit collusion by making passive investments in rivals. In general, the incentives of firms to collude depend in a complex way on the whole set of partial cross ownership (PCO) in the industry. We show that when firms are identical, only...

The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics. This assumption is often justied either formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, we show that in almost every game and for almost every family of...

This paper develops a general methodology for characterizing the dynamic evolution of preferences in a wide class of strategic interactions. We give simple conditions characterizing the limiting distribution of preferences in general games, and apply our results to study the evolutionary...

We consider auction environments in which bidders must incur a cost to learn their valuations and study the optimal selling mechanisms in such environments. These mechanisms specify for each period, as a function of the bids in previous periods, which new potential buyers should be asked to bid....