This paper explores the drivers of inter-firm R&D collaborations in a particular type of innovation network, the technological districts created in Italy under a specific public policy to promote innovation. The empirical analysis used an original database containing information on research...

Does Facebook make people lonely and unhappy? Empirical studies have produced conflicting results about the effect of social networking sites (SNS) use on individual welfare. We use a representative sample of the Italian population to investigate how actual and virtual networks of social...

We enquiry about the effects of first and second order stochastic dominance shifts of the distribution of the consumers’ willingness to pay, within the standard model of a market with network externalities and hump-shaped demand curve. This issue is analyzed in the polar cases of perfect...

The Beveridge-Nelson decomposition defines the trend component in terms of the eventual forecast function, as the value the series would take if it were on its long-run path. The paper in-troduces the multistep Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, which arises when the forecast function is obtained...

In discrete choice models the marginal effect of a variable of interest that is interacted with another variable differs from the marginal effect of a variable that is not interacted with any variable. The magnitude of the interaction effect is also not equal to the marginal effect of the...

We consider a model of production with a continuum of linear techniques and examine the related choice of technique and shape of the demand for capital schedule. The primary conclusion regards the possibility of a decreasing demand for capital schedule combined with reswitching and reverse...

This note presents an ordered search model in which consumers search both for price and product fitness. We construct an equilibrium in which there is price dispersion and prices rise in the order of search. The top firms in consumer search process, though charge lower prices, earn higher...

Taking note of the wide variety and growing list of models in the literature to explain patterns of behavior observed in laboratory experiments, this paper identifies two tests, the Variety Test (ability of a model to explain outcomes under variety or alternative scenarios) and the Psychological...

We consider a possible game-theoretic foundation of Forchheimer’s model of dominant-firm price leadership based on quantity-setting games with one large firm and many small firms. If the large firm is the exogenously given first mover, we obtain Forchheimer’s model. We also investigate...

In this paper we provide a generalization of the standard models of the diffusion of a new product. Consumers are heterogeneous and risk averse, and the firm is uncertain about the demand curve: both learn from past observations. The attitude towards risk has important effects with regard to the...