The notion of face-to-face contacts has recently become very popular in regional economics and in economic geography. This is the most obvious way to explain why firms still locate in proximity to others after the "death of distance", i.e., the shrinking costs for transportation, especially...

Rubinstein (2007) has recently found that the frequency of (types of) decisions made in Internet experiments are related to the time taken for these decisions. Other authors have investigated this relationship by exerting some time pressure. In this paper, I report on an attempt to do the...

Economic page turners like Freakonomics are well written and there is much to be learned from them - not only about economics, but also about writing techniques. Their authors know how to build up suspense, i.e., they make readers want to know what comes. An uncountable number of pages in books...

Becker and Murphy (1988) constructed, in a well-known paper, a model of rational addiction in which people solve a dynamic optimization problem, choose an optimal timepath of drug consumption and thereby maximize lifetime utility. The model leads to the hypothesis that future consumption is a...