We refine the understanding of individual preferences across social lotteries, whereby the payoffs of a pair of subjects are exposed to random shocks. We find that aggregate behavior is ex-post and ex-ante inequality averse, but also that there is a wide variety of individual preferences and...

Social lotteries are lotteries that are played along with someone else. The experimental literature indicates that risk attitudes depend on how one’s situation in the safe alternative compares to that of a peer. Evaluation of the risky alternative also depends on whether the lottery gives...

We argue in this paper that attention to one's blog is won by paying attention to other bloggers. We derive properties of blogging networks from a model where bloggers trade attention and content. The predictions from the model are then checked against a novel dataset from LiveJournal, a major...

Those lecture notes cover the basics of a course in microeconomic theory for MSc students in Economics. They were developed over five years of teaching MSc Economic Theory I in the School of Economics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. The lectures differ from the standard fare in...

Properties of blogging networks are derived from a model where bloggers devote attention to others, produce content for others, and exchange attention with content within their network of relations. The predictions from the model are tested with a novel dataset from LiveJournal, a major blogging...

I consider a Vickrey-Salop model of spatial product differentiation with quasi-linear utility functions and contrast two modes of production, the proprietary model where entrepreneurs sell software to the users, and the open source model where users participate in software development. I show...

The rivalry between developers of open source and proprietary software encourages open source developers to court users and respond to their needs. If the open source developer wants to promote her own open source standard and solutions, she may choose liberal license terms such as those of the...

This paper examines one of the most important marketing strategies by software producers on the Internet. That is whether to offer free samples and if so, whether to list the samples on shareware repositories. I show that firms with higher value products have a greater incentive to offer free...

Behavioural and industrial economists have argued that, because of cognitive limitations, consumers are liable to make sub-optimal choices in complex decision problems. Firms can exploit these limitations by introducing spurious complexity into tariff structures, weakening price competition....