This paper presents a model in which agents are distinguished by their characteristics, communication between firms and their customers plays an important role, and agents with similar characteristics communicate more effectively. The model is applied to annual data on the distribution of men...

The usual explanation for why the producers of a given product use different technologies involves "vintage-capital": A firm understands the frontier technology, but can still prefer an older, less efficient technology in which it has made specific physical and human capital investments. This...

Firm numbers first rise, and then fall as the typical industry evolves. This nonmonotonicity in the number of producers is explained in this paper using a competitive model in which innovation opportunities induce firms to enter, but in which a firm's failure to implement new technology causes...

Evolution of technology causes human capital to become obsolete. We study this phenomenon in an overlapping generations setting, assuming it is hard to predict how technology will evolve, and that older workers find updating uneconomic. Among our results is the proposition that (under certain...

Brandenburger and Stuart (1996) identified coalitional games as a means of providing precise notions of value to evaluate strategic opportunities. In this paper, we show how coalitional game theory can be utilized to operationalize these approaches. In particular, we demonstrate the importance...