This paper examines optimal regulatory testing requirements when new product quality is uncertain but market participants may learn over time. We develop a model capturing the regulator's tradeoff between consumer risk exposure and access to innovation. Using new data and exogenous variation...

This paper studies the interaction of information disclosure and reputational concerns in certication markets. We argue that by revealing less precise information a certifier reduces the threat of capture. Opaque disclosure rules may reduce profits but also constrain feasible bribes. For large...

The petroleum refining industry has changed over the past decades from one in which capacity primarily served local and regional markets to one in which trade in refined petroleum products has become more widespread. We investigate the hypothesis of increasing globalization by examining the...

China's electricity sector has experienced substantial efficiency improvement during the last one and a half decades. The recent literature has mostly attributed the efficiency improvement to the 2002 unbundling reform with little attention paid to the large scale retrofitting process introduced...

Pricing rules in wholesale electricity markets are usually classified around two major groups, namely linear (aka non-discriminatory) and non-linear (aka discriminatory). As well known, the major difference lies on the way non-convexities are considered in the computation of market prices.

In the dominant firm-competitive fringe model, where firms purchase input from a common supplier via two-part tariff contracts, we demonstrate that countervailing power may be neutral. Unlike Chen (2003), more countervailing power may not lead to lower consumer prices.

This paper analyzes location and price choices of firms and subsequent location choices of consumers in a linear city model when consumers have different perceptions of locations and firms. The study utilizes a continuous logit model to describe consumers’ location and supplier choices. A...

In this paper we study stochastic dynamic games with many players; these are a fundamental model for a wide range of economic applications. The standard solution concept for such games is Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE), but it is well known that MPE computation becomes intractable as the...

We build a theoretical model to study a market structure with a marketing cooperative and direct selling, in which many farmers are members of an agricultural marketing cooperative. They can sell their production either to the cooperative or on an oligopolistic local market. We show that the...

A striking feature of many online sales platforms is the coexistence of multiple sales mechanisms. Items on eBay, for instance, are frequently offered through auctions, posted prices, and buy-it-now auctions. In this article, I study how this mechanism multiplicity influences the welfare of...