In this paper, we investigate the impact of market structure on the relationship between inflation and price dispersion. We first propose a new empirical model of the relationship between inflation and dispersion with firmer theoretical foundations, and then extend the basic model to incorporate...

We develop a model to estimate simultaneously import shares, export shares, outward foreign direct investment and domestic profits for a large sample of U.S. manufacturing industries. In our model, trade barriers alter the ability of domestic market structure to influence domestic performance....

Medical technology adoption is a major contributor to rising health care expenditures in the US. Multiple market failures provide incentives for hospitals to adopt technologies. Unrestricted entry may result in excess capacity and reductions in output that are inefficient with respect to cost...

Is gift-exchange inevitably to be crowded out by impersonal market exchange? The presence of a thick-market externality indicates that this is indeed likely to be the case. But reciprocity or gift-exchange induces social relations. The utility function is extended in order to take account of...

This paper analyzes the impact of competition among downstream firms on an upstream firm's payoff and on its incentives to vertically integrate when firms on both segments negotiate optimal contracts. The author argues that tougher competiton decreases the downstream industry profit, but...

The endogeneity of preferences implies that not only individual preferences -along with technologies, government policies, and the organization of society and markets- determine economic outcomes, but also that the economic, social, legal, and cultural structure of society affects preferences....

When the production of high quality needs the employment of qualified labour, firms' decisions concerning quality are affected by the extent to which skills are abundant. By means of a comparison between monopoly and perfect competition, we show how market power in such a context may entail a...

In market games the one to one correspondence between commodity types and trading posts would be justified if it were true that the set of equilibria is not affected by the number of trading posts postulated at the ouset of the model. We show that this is not true.

This paper shows that if domestic firms do not have identical unit costs, then the interplay between the Herfindahl index of concentration and the elasticity of the slope of the demand curve is of major importance in the determination of optimal trade policies. When the demand curve is concave,...

A critical, but largely unexamined assumption in the debate over reform policy design, concerns the complementarity or substitutability of market competition and private ownership in increasing firm efficiency. We analyse a simple Cournot model that distinguishes two aspects of privatization...