Firms may coordinate their R&D decisions by a merger or an R&D alliance. The European Union stimulates R&D alliances. It expects that these stimulate R&D investments, and guarantee that the cooperating firms compete in the product market. The alliances may, however, stimulate firms to collude in...

This entry for a Handbook of Evolutionary Economics offers a short sketch of the applicability of evolutionary economics to law, and in particular to the economic analysis of law. The entry has three main sections, emphasizing in turn issues of transaction costs, the concept of the legal system...

In one-dimensional environments with single-peaked preferences we consider social welfare functions satisfying Arrow''s requirements, i.e. weak Pareto and independence of irrelevant alternatives. When the policy space is a one-dimensional continuum such a welfare function is determined by a...

In 1848 freedom of press was written into the Constitution of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This paper investigates the expected life span of daily newspapers in the Netherlands since then. Life expectancy depends on the cyclical evolution of the number of daily newspapers through time. The...

In spatial environments we consider social welfare functions satisfying Arrow''s requirements, i.e. weak Pareto and independence of irrelevant alternatives. When the policy space is a one-dimensional continuum such a welfare function is determined by a collection of 2 N strictly quasiconcave...

We present a laboratory experiment in which we investigate bidding behavior with independent private values in the recently proposed bisection auction, and compare it with two classical auction formats - the Vickrey auction and the English auction. We test whether subjects behave strategically...

We analyze a principal-agent model in which a principal has two possibilities to improve his knowledge about the quality of an investment project. First, he has access to an informationtechnology that provides a \textit{verifiable}, unbiased signal. Second, he can hire an agent who detects bad...

We put forward a model of private goods with externalities. Agents derive benefit fromcommunicating with each other. In order to communicate they need to have a language in common.Learning languages is costly. In this setting no individually rational and feasible Grovesmechanism exists. We...

In the information technology industries there are several instances of a division of labour between research companies and manufacturers, who apply the researcher''s know how in production. Firms use several different ways to organise the decision making and transfer of know how. The paper...

This note reexamines the connection between the asymmetric Nash bargaining solution and the equilibria of strategic bargaining games. Several papers in the literature obtain the asymmetric Nash bargaining solution as the unique limit of subgame perfect equilibria in stationary strategies when...