This paper examines the effects of remedial mathematics on performance in university-level economics courses using a natural experiment. We study exam results prior and subsequent to the implementation of a remedial mathematics course that was compulsory for a sub-set of students and unavailable...

If Cournot oligopolists face uncertainty about the intercept of a linear demand function and if the realized market price must be non-negative, then expected demand becomes convex, which can create a multiplicity of equilibria. This note shows that if the distribution of the demand intercept has...

I develop a model of rent seeking with informational foundations and an arbitrary number of rent seekers, and I compare the results with Tullock's (1980) classic model where the influence activities are "black-boxed." Given the microfoundations, the welfare consequences of rent seeking can be...

The answer is no. Although naive intuition may suggest the opposite, uncertainty about costs in the homogeneous-good Bertrand model intensifies competition: it lowers price and raises total surplus (but also makes profits go up). For some economic environments, this is implied by Hansen’s...

We study a monopoly insurance model with endogenous information acquisition. Through a continuous effort choice, consumers can determine the precision of a privately observed signal that is informative about their accident risk. The equilibrium effort is, depending on parameter values, either...

A uniform pricing rule may enable the communication of demand information from buyer to seller in situations where this would not have been possible if the seller could price discriminate. Importantly, such a rule can benefit both buyer and seller.