The behaviour of urban populations is compared with the systems directing behaviour in individuals. This is both a metaphor and a mechanistic parallel. The biological model draws upon recent developments in brain research and psychological and cultural anthropology. The development and operation...

Mobile-only users are usually considered as a consequence of fi xed-mobile substitution. Via a unique dataset based on a a large European country survey and consumers’invoice data, this study reveals heterogeneous preferences for fixed services among consumers. The data is fitted in a mixed...

Recent theoretical models of network competition with call externalities demonstrate strategic incentives of incumbent providers to reduce receiver benefits in rival network by excessive off-net pricing. Such anti-competitive pricing practices have a potentially damaging impact on financial...

Prices that end with 9, also known as psychological price points, are common, comprising about 70% of the retail prices. They are also more rigid than other prices. We take advantage of a natural experiment to document an emergence of a new price ending that has the same effects as 9-endings. In...

There is widespread evidence that some firms use false advertising to overstate the value of their products. We consider a model in which a policymaker is able to punish such false claims. We characterize an equilibrium where false advertising actively influences rational buyers, and analyze the...

We study subgame-perfect equilibria of the classical quality-price, multistage game of vertical product differentiation. Each firm can choose the levels of an arbitrary number of qualities. Consumers' valuations are drawn from independent and general distributions. The unit cost of production is...

The main purpose of this paper is to develop generalized 'State Dependent Models' (SDM) in a multivariate framework for empirical analysis. This significantly extends the existing SDM which only allow univariate analysis following a simple AR process. The extended model enables greater...

The aim of this paper is to study the empirical phenomenon of rating bubbles, i.e. clustering on extremely positive values in e-commerce platforms and rating web sites. By means of a field experiment that exogenously manipulates prior ratings for a hotel in an important Italian tourism...

We analyse how strategic competition between a green firm and a brown competitor develops when their products are differentiated along two dimensions: hedonic quality and environmental quality. The former dimension refers to the pure (intrinsic) performance of the good, whereas the latter...

This paper develops a conceptual framework that can explain why economic development goes along with increases in body weight and obesity rates. We first introduce the concept of novelty consumption, which refers to an increase in food availability due to trade or innovation. Then we study how...