Participants in a supply chain of agricultural value-added products face significant challenges. Many of the costly distinctive traits desired by consumers are difficult (if not impossible) to observe even after consumption. A complicating factor, addressed here, is that in some circumstances...

A repeated-purchases model is developed to explore the fundamental economic factors that lie behind the choice of different quality assurance systems and their associated degrees of stringency by firms. Differences in the quality discoverability of a sought-after attribute, market structure,...

We consider the provision of an optimal warranty in a continuous-time model with two-sided moral hazard. The optimal warranty must balance the producer's durability incentive and the buyer's maintenance incentive. Too little warranty protection gives the producer too much incentive to produce...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that producers of information products (TV programs, movies, computer software) may respond to potentially cost-saving technological change by increasing, rather than reducing, their total production investments in the 'first copy' of each product, possibly at the...

As developing countries open themselves up to trade, many industrial firms in these countries are finding it difficult to compete internationally due to poor product quality and low product variety. Although China has been the largest producer of crude steel since 1996, China's steel firms have...

This study deals with horizontal product differentiation in the Polish pig meat market. Hypothesis among firms behaviour are derived from an illustrative model and tested in an empirical analysis using data from 1991-1998. The empirical analysis suggest that product differentiation is a relevant...

We study the relation between product quality and worker quality using an economic model that, under certain conditions, provides a direct link between product price, product quality and work-force quality. Our measures of product quality are the evolution in the detailed product price relative...

We analyse the impact of increased outside opportunities brought to consumers by access to a global market on local market performance under monopoly versus oligopoly. If consumers have to choose once where to shop we show that under all forms of organizing the local market, increased...

We build a simple theoretical model to understand why developing and transition economies have increasingly applied anti-dumping laws. To that end, we investigate the strategic incentives of oligopolistic exporting firms to undertake dumping in these economies. We show that dumping may be due to...

We examine an export game where two firms (home and foreign), located in two different countries, produce vertically differentiated products. The foreign firm is the most efficient in terms of R&D costs of quality development and the foreign country is relatively larger and endowed with a...