While there are suggestions in applied cartel studies that price dispersion changes when cartelization of a market occurs, there are few theoretical or empirical analyses of this effect. This paper surveys the thin economic literature on the link between overt collusion and price dispersion....

We consider a dynamic oligopoly model in which a seller may drop out of the market when demand for its product is insufficient in the first period. Buyers suffer some disutility if a seller exits the market and so their first period purchase decision does not only depend on current period...

We examine the interplay of imperfect competition and incomplete information in the context of price competition among firms producing horizontally- and vertically-differentiated substitute products. We find that incomplete information about vertical quality (e.g., consumer satisfaction), which...

This paper attempts to add greater insight into the study of political influence. It analyzes contracts for lobbying by first placing them into their proper political economy context as well as analyzing them in a modified information transmission mechanism. The main contributions include a more...

In this paper the relevance of public and symmetric information on the enforceability of contracts will be analyzed. In particular, it will examine an historical contract, the sea loan, which was used to finance long-distance maritime commerce from the times of ancient Greece to those of...

This paper analyzes two equivalent equilibrium motions under asymmetric information: risk neutral rational expectations equilibria (rn-REE), and common knowledge equilibria. We show that the set of fully informative rn-REE is a singleton, and we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for...

The discussion about health care systems focuses on the dynamics of expenditures and on the weak growth of revenues. In this discussion, it is widely overseen that medical expenditures and the supply of medical services depend crucially on the compensation of physician services. The paper...

This paper formalizes the foreign investors' investment decision in the economic reform projects of developing countries with political instability. Although foreign direct investment (FDI) increases capital and advanced technology flows to developing countries, relatively high concentration of...

We consider optimal trade policy for a large country with private information. We show that the optimal tariff leads to a signaling equilibrium with higher tariffs and lower welfare than under complete information, whereas the optimal import quota replicates the complete information equilibrium...

We study the problem of a regulator who must control the emissions of a given pollutant from a series of industries when the firms' abatement costs are unknown. We develop a mechanism in which the regulator asks firms to report their abatement costs and implements the most stringent emissions...