Are business associations - private, formal, nonprofit organizations designed to promote the common interests of their members - positive or negative for the economy and overall welfare? Scholars from institutional and organizational economics, on the one side, and from industrial organization,...

The process of innovation is driven by two main factors: new inventions and institutions supporting the transformation of inventions into marketable innovations. This paper proposes a new institution, called a semi-public competition, that has been neglected by the economic literature but exists...

We recommend that an auction market replace the current system for submitting academic papers and show a strict Pareto-improvement of equilibrium. Besides the benefits of speed, this mechanmism increases the average quality of articles and journals and rewards editors and referees for their...

Are business associations - private, formal, nonprofit organizations designed to promote the common interests of their members - positive or negative for the economy and overall welfare? Scholars from institutional and organizational economics, on the one side, and from industrial organization,...

Should mergers among nonprofit organizations be regulated differently than mergers among for-profit firms? The relevant empirical literature is highly controversial, the theoretical literature is scarce. I analyze the question by modeling duopoly competition with quality-differentiated goods. I...

Impersonal exchange has been a major driver of economic development. But transactors with no stake in maintaining an ongoing relationship have little incentive to honor deals. Therefore, all economies have developed institutions to support honest trade and realize the gains of impersonal...

Economic articles are published very slowly. We believe this results mainly from the poor incentives referees face. We recommend that an auction market replace the current system for submitting papers and demonstrate a strict Pareto-improvement of equilibrium. Besides the benefits of speed, this...

The modern world is complex and difficult to understand for voters, who may hold beliefs that are at variance with reality. Politicians face incentives to pander to voters' beliefs to get reelected. We analyze the welfare effects of this pandering and show that it entails both costs and...