post keynesianism meets feminist economics this article explores the relationships between post keynesian economics and feminist economics it distinguishes three key concepts in each tradition that recommend serious attention in the other tradition gender the household and unpaid work and caring as key concepts in feminist economics uncertainty market power and endogenous dynamics as core concepts in post keynesian economics this article will show with reference to the literature in which such cross fertilisation has been explored already how both traditions can be enriched from a stronger mutual engagement

ten little treasures of game theory and ten intuitive contradictions this paper reports laboratory data for games that are played only once these games span the standard categories static and dynamic games with complete and incomplete information for each game the treasure is a treatment in which behavior conforms nicely to predictions of the nash equilibrium or relevant refinement in each case however a change in the payoff structure produces a large inconsistency between theoretical predictions and observed behavior these contradictions are generally consistent with simple intuition based on the interaction of payoff asymmetries and noisy introspection about others decisions

price setting in online markets does it click using a unique dataset of daily u s and u k price listings and the associated number of clicks for precisely defined goods from a major shopping platform we shed new light on how prices are set in online markets which have a number of special properties such as low search costs low costs of monitoring competitors prices and low costs of nominal price adjustment we document that although online prices are more flexible than offline prices they nevertheless exhibit relatively long spells of fixed prices large size and low synchronization of price changes considerable crosssectional dispersion and low sensitivity to predictable or unanticipated changes in demand conditions qualitatively these patterns are similar to those observed for offline prices a finding that suggests a need for more research on the sources of price rigidities and dispersion

oligopolistic markets with sequential search and production cost uncertainty this article analyzes a sequential search model where firms face identical but stochastic production costs the realizations of which are unknown to consumers we characterize a perfect bayesian equilibrium satisfying a reservation price property and provide a sufficient condition for such an equilibrium to exist we show that i firms set on average higher prices and make larger profits compared to the scenario where consumers observe production costs ii expected prices and consumer welfare can be non monotonic in the number of firms and iii the impact of production cost uncertainty vanishes as the number of firms becomes very large

sdg 8 decent work and economic growth a gendered analysis abstract sdg 8 calls for promoting sustained inclusive and sustainable economic growth full and productive employment and decent work for all even as it highlights the importance of labour rights for all it also makes visible some significant tensions we note for example that despite many critiques of narrow economic measures of growth the focus here remains on gdp and per capita growth this is problematic we argue because the gdp productive boundary excludes much of social reproductive work this puts sdg8 in tension with sdg 5 which calls for the recognition of the value of unpaid care and domestic work there has been a significant increase in the rate of working women in the formal and informal sector however there has not been a subsequent gender shift in the doing of social reproductive work in this paper we argue sdg 8 s focus on decent work and economic growth is inadequate that productive employment and decent work for all men and women by 2030 needs to take into account the value and costs of social reproduction we trace key historical debates on work to argue that both gender and labour rights have to underpin sdg 8 if its promise of inclusive sustainable and decent work is to be realized

discrete equilibrium price dispersion an explicit solution of an equilibrium model with price setting firms and searching customers makes possible a number of comparativestatics predictions about how cost differences among firms search costs of customers and taxes will affect the mean and variance of the distribution of market prices another implication of the model is that a firm s demand depends on the difference between its price and the average price in the market

women s changing participation in the labor force a world perspective this paper describes how the composition of the labor force changes with economic development it considers recent trends in women s labor force participation and the type of jobs held in various sectors as national per capita income increases the paper notes that women are more likely to work in the family or informal labor market if the labor costs to firms exceed the opportunity costs of female labor to family enterprises firms are at a relative disadvantage compared with families in the employment of less experienced and less skilled labor presumably because their labor costs are affected by such regulations as minimum wage social insurance premiums and limits on firing in asia and africa an increase in the proportion of employment in firms within the major sectors accounts for most of the rapid growth in women s overall share of wage employment in latin america however growth in the proportion of firm employment has been slower than elsewhere and the share of women in wage employment has even fallen overall in several countries it is not unreasonable to assume that women have lost more than men from market regulations and distortions but little research has addressed this proposition if it is true however these interventions in the labor market may be responsible for slowing women s transition from nonmarket and family work to firm employment this in turn may affect the rate and structure of economic growth

the stability of price dispersion under seller and consumer learning in many markets it is possible to find rival sellers charging different prices for the same good earlier research has attempted to explain this phenomenon by demonstrating the existence of dispersed price equilibria when consumers must make use of costly search to discover prices we ask whether such equilibria can be learned when sellers adjust prices adaptively in response to current market conditions with consumer behavior fixed convergence to a dispersed price equilibrium is possible in some cases however once consumer learning is introduced the monopoly outcome first found by diamond journal of economic theory3 1971 156 68 is the only stable equilibrium

labor markets as gendered institutions equality efficiency and empowerment issues abstract labor markets are gendered institutions operating at the intersection of the productive and reproductive economies participation in labor markets does not automatically empower women reduction in gender differentials in earnings may be the result of harmonizing down rather than up discrimination against women may persist because in the absence of institutional changes it is profitable it is important to distinguish between static and dynamic and micro and macro efficiency labor market regulation has an important role to play in the institutional transformation needed to reconcile goals of efficiency and equality

firm strategy and biased decision making the price dispersion puzzle this article confronts the empirical evidence and theoretical predictions about the correlation between price dispersion and price theoretically search and location differentiation models suggest that price dispersion is a function of search and transportation costs but is independent of the good s price empirical evidence however suggests otherwise price dispersion and price are strongly correlated this article points out the discrepancy between theory and evidence which it denotes as the price dispersion puzzle it then explains why the documented behaviour of relative thinking people behave as if their search or transportation costs are increasing in the good s price can solve the puzzle

trends countertrends and gaps in women s employment abstract the factors driving global integration namely trade expansion technological change and the internationalization of production have altered production patterns and changed the composition of output in both developed and developing countries as global patterns and modes of production have changed there has been a general shift away from agriculture toward industry and services along with these output changes have come significant changes in regional and national employment in developing and developed countries these changes span divergent trends on the one hand there is the increased availability of more and better quality employment as workers shift out of agriculture and subsistence production and into waged employment in the expanding manufacturing and service sectors on the other hand there have been sectors where the trend has been away from formalization toward the informalization and semi formalization of production activities and employment practices women have generally benefited from improvements in the world economy this article demonstrates however that patterns of employment and income generation among women often diverge however from global trends in important ways that suggest that the forces shaping global integration effect women differently the article frames a policy discussion that the international center for research on women led to debate the implications of recent trends in women s employment in the developing and developed world the six articles in this section represent this discussion they span a range of empirical and theoretical inquiry exploring global employment trends and highlighting changes in women s participation in formal and informal economic activities

a decomposition method on employment and wage discrimination and its application in urban china 2002 2013 abstract labor market discrimination is an important issue in developing countries where path dependent institutions have been dominant while effective institutional arrangements and policies have been hidden by local customs and culture however the existing applications of classical blinder oaxaca decomposition face criticism for their imprecise understanding of the factors affecting institutional discrimination in labor markets as well as for their lack of power in formulating well targeted anti discrimination policies following oaxaca 1973 we propose a new method to decompose the total discrimination index tdi to analyze employment and wage discrimination in the labor markets of developing countries the tdi is decomposed into the employment discrimination index edi and the wage discrimination index wdi then into the underpayment index to majorities upi and the overpayment index to minorities opi we apply this method to the institutional discrimination against rural migrants in china s urban areas using national representative data from 2002 to 2013 we have found that 1 the tdi increased quickly after china entered the wto then dropped after anti discrimination policies were implemented 2 the tdi is mainly determined by the upi while the tdi s fluctuation is mainly determined by the wdi our method provides insights into the changing composition of employment and wage discrimination and their respective labor market outcomes in developing countries as a result appropriate policy measures may be developed accordingly

multiproduct equilibrium price dispersion abstract the model of burdett and judd econometrica51 1993 955 969 is generalized to the case of may goods consumers choose the best price observed for each good there are two classes of equilibria those that involve constant expected profits for each good independently of price and those with increasing profits for each good in price a continuum of the latter type always exists these equilibria are qualitatively different than the unique equilibrium of the single good case journal of economic literature classification numbers d83 d43 l13

costly buyer search in laboratory markets with seller advertising in this experiment sellers simultaneously choose prices and advertising strategies buyers either purchase at an advertised price or search sequentially for other prices in the unique symmetric equilibrium sellers charge a high unadvertised price or advertise a price chosen from a lower interval increases in search or advertising costs raise equilibrium prices and affect equilibrium advertising intensity empirical results are consistent with most comparative static predictions sellers however price much lower and advertise more intensely than predicted consequently market outcomes more closely resemble a perfect information bertrand like equilibrium than the imperfect information mixed strategy equilibrium with significant seller market power

an experimental study of price dispersion in an optimal search model with advertising abstract this paper reports a laboratory experiment to study pricing and advertising behavior with costly buyer search sellers simultaneously post prices and may incur a cost to advertise this price in the unique symmetric equilibrium sellers either charge a high unadvertised price or randomize in an interval of lower advertised prices increases in search or advertising costs raise equilibrium prices and equilibrium advertising intensity decreases with lower search costs and higher advertising costs our experimental results support these comparative static predictions and sellers also post high unadvertised prices as predicted in all treatments however sellers advertise more intensely than in equilibrium

globalisation women s economic rights and forced labour economy s penetration by foreign direct investment by and large has no sta tistically significant impact globalisation might weaken the general bargaining position of labour such that outcome related la bour standards might suffer however being more open toward trade is likely to promote rather than hinder the realisation of t wo labour rights considered as core or fundamental by the international labour organisation namely the elimination of economic discrimination and of forced labour

the effect of trade openness on women s welfare and work life summary this study of 134 countries analyzes whether women are generally the losers or winners of globalization the results show that economic integration does not directly improve women s life expectancies women s access to primary and secondary education may improve slightly although women s welfare does not seem to improve more than that of men on the other hand economic integration does influence women s professional lives in developing countries trade openness increases female labor force participation in industrialized states it decreases the share of working women trade openness in developed countries increases the number of women employed in the service sector while in developing states it increases the number of women working in industrial jobs and in agriculture

the reconstruction of the supply side of the labour market the relative autonomy of social reproduction been replaced in recent years by a proliferation of theories about the family and its rela tion to the system of production 1 it is our contention that this work for the most part has done little to establish the family system as an interesting central and dynamic vari able for economic analysis this outcome however is the direct result of the application of two opposing but equally inappropriate methodologies for the analysis of the family system in this paper we examine the main approaches to the analysis of social reproduc tion using the position of women in the system of production and reproduction as the main example of existing work on social reproduction we show that across the whole spectrum of theoretical approaches from neoclassical to marxist and feminist broadly similar methodologies for analysing the relationships between the spheres of production and reproduction have been employed

a laboratory study of advertising and price competition abstract we use a laboratory experiment to study advertising and pricing behavior in a market where consumers differ in price sensitivity equilibrium in this market entails variation in the number of firms advertising and price dispersion in advertised prices we vary the cost to advertise as well as varying the number of competing firms theory predicts that advertising costs act as a facilitating device higher costs increase firm profits at the expense of consumers we find that higher advertising costs decrease demand for advertising and raise advertised prices as predicted further this comes at the expense of consumers however advertising strategies are more aggressive than theory predicts with the result that firm profits do not increase

asymmetric price effects of competition when price dispersion is prevalent a relevant question is what happens to the whole distribution of equilibrium prices when the number of firms changes using data from the gasoline market in the netherlands we find first that markets with n competitors have price distributions that first order stochastically dominate the price distributions in markets with n 1 firms second the effect of competition is stronger for the medium to upper percentiles of the price distribution finally consumer gains from competition are larger for relatively well informed consumers to account for these empirical patterns we extend varian s 1980 model by allowing for richer heterogeneity in consumer price information

it takes two to tango equilibria in a model of sales we show that the varian model of sales with more than two firms has two types of equilibria a unique symmetric equilibrium and a continuum of asymmetric equilibria in contrast the 2 firm game has a unique equilibrium that is symmetric for the n firm case the asymmetric equilibria imply mixed strategies that can be ranked by first order stochastic dominance this enables one to rule out asymmetric equilibria on economic grounds by constructing a metagame in which both firms and consumers are players the unique subgame perfect equilibrium of this metagame is symmetric

property rights asset specificity and the division of labour under alternative capitalist relations is the division of labor under capitalism because of transaction and technological efficiency or because of inefficient capitalist property rights the answer of this paper is that under classical capitalism there is an inefficient division of labor because of underinvestment in asset specific labor which can be improved by expanding workers rights in two different ways defining company workers and unionized capitalism an implication of the analysis is that markets far from being the selection mechanism where efficient institutions evolve may imply the reproduction of inefficient property rights and be shaped by them copyright 1991 by oxford university press

oligopolistic pricing with sequential consumer search n identical stores compete by choosing prices for a homogeneous good with constant marginal costs consumers search sequentially with perfect recall for the lowest price one class of consumers called shoppers have zero search costs while all other consumers have a positive search cost c there is a unique symmetric nash equilibrium price distribution with the property that it changes smoothly from marginal cost pricing when all consumers are shoppers and or c 0 and monopoly pricing when no consumers are shoppers remarkably as the number of stores increases the nash equilibrium becomes more monopolistic copyright 1989 by american economic association

economic transition and the motherhood wage penalty in urban china investigation using panel data china s economic transition has fundamentally changed the mechanisms for allocating and compensating labour this paper investigates how the economic transition has affected the wage gap between mothers and childless women in urban china using panel data for the period 1990 2005 the results show that overall mothers earned considerably less than childless women additionally the wage penalties for motherhood went up substantially from the gradualist reform period 1990 96 to the radical reform period 1999 2005 the results also show that that although motherhood does not appear to have a significant wage effect for the state sector it imposes substantial wage losses for mothers in the non state sector these findings suggest that the economic transition has shifted part of the cost of childbearing and rearing from the state and employers back to women in the form of lower earnings for working mothers copyright oxford university press

women and labor market changes in the global economy growth helps inequalities hurt and public policy matters this report examines the level and changes in female and male participation rates employment segregation and female wages relative to male wages across the world economy it funds sufficient evidence to support the view that labor markets in developing countries are transformed relatively quickly in the sense that gender differentials in employment and pay are narrowing much faster than they did in industrialized countries however the report evaluates the inefficiencies arising from persisting gender differentials in the labor market and finds them to be potentially significant the estimates also indicate that the resulting deadweight losses are borne primarily by women while men gain mainly in relative terms there are no real winners from discrimination the paper concludes that growth benefits women at large inequalities can have significantly adverse effects on welfare and market based development alone can be a weak instrument doe reducing inequality between the sexes to break the vicious cycle of women s low initial human capital endowments and inferior labor market outcomes compared to men s the report proposes greater access to education and training for girls and women enforceable equal pay and equal employment opportunities legislation a taxation and benefits structure that treats reproduction as an economic activity and women as equal partners within households and a better accounting of women s work to include invisible production

gender and trade aspects of labour markets we provide a comprehensive up to date review of the large body of theory and evidence on the linkages between trade liberalisation and gender inequality in income as well as two of the latter s key underlying determinants wages and employment on balance the evidence for developing countries points to an overall beneficial impact of trade expansion on female employment both relative to male employment and in absolute terms although largely concentrated in unskilled manufacturing by contrast the bulk of the evidence suggests a widening gender wage gap as a result of freer trade

tirole s industrial regulation and organization legacy in economics jean tirole was awarded the 2014 sveriges riksbank prize in economic sciences in memory of alfred nobel for his analysis of market power and regulation this paper provides an overview of some of that work and of his related contributions to game theory

competitive promotional strategies this article analyzes the equilibrium pricing strategies of brands engaged in a pricing game each brand has a monopoly market loyal consumers and competes with others in a common market called brand switchers in the case of a duopoly it is shown that the behavior of the brand switchers characterizes the equilibrium behavior of the duopolists this article focuses on two key comparative statics namely the depth of discounts away from a regular high price and the probability of giving a deal or the frequency of deals how these properties vary with the size of the loyal markets and the behavior of the brand switching population is discussed copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

tracking customer search to price discriminate suppose that every time you walked around the mall somebody put a bar code on your shoulder and as you walked into the shops in the mall someone came up and scanned your shoulder and got the number went to a database saying ah yes that s lesley who visited the shop next door 15 minutes ago that s the level of surveillance that s going on on the internet internet entrepreneur jason catlett in a 60 minutes interview with lesley stahl not as private as you think aired november 28 1999 i introduction transaction mechanisms in an electronic marketplace can be much different from those used in traditional markets predominantly brick and mortar markets are described as sellers posting single offer prices that buyers either accept or reject through their purchase decisions without necessarily holding everything else constant two buyers each making concurrent purchases in the same store pay the same posted price for an identical item 1 in particular a buyer that has visited multiple rival stores receives the same price as a buyer that impulsively purchases without comparing any prices in contrast a combination of internet technologies makes it possible to identify the search history of potential customers online retailers generally make use of a standard programming device that produces electronic files to tag individual customers with a unique identification commonly referred to as cookies these small computer files are stored on the hard drive of the customer s computer developers created cookies so that a web site could maintain state even though the http protocol is stateless this allows a web site to recognize an individual and accommodate multiple item purchases from an internet retailer 2 an unintended consequence of this technology is that other web sites namely rival sellers could use a second internet device called a web bug to retrieve the identity of the internet domain that placed a cookie even though the specific information content of the cookie is typically encrypted two different types of web bugs can ascertain the search history of a customer a web bug is a graphic typically one pixel by one pixel in size on a web page and it is designed to monitor who is reading the web page web bugs are virtually invisible because they are uncolored and so small one type an executable web bug is a file that monitors a machine s traffic and hard drive and periodically sends the information back to the web site that planted the bug on the machine the second type is not physically located on the machine and uses a technology called scripts e g javascript activex and perl to scan a hard drive searching for files 3 4 because the process of identifying a customer and posting an offer price is electronic and immediate sellers on the internet can use this technology to post dynamic customer specific prices 5 however the major contributions to the rich literature on consumer search consider only models in which firms post a single price regardless of how informed the customer may be for example braverman 1980 varian 1980 stiglitz 1979 and salop and stiglitz 1977 assume that a consumer is either fully informed or completely unaware of other stores prices and that each firm posts a single price to any customer other work considers sequential consumer search but again each firm posts a single price regardless of how informed the customer may be see for example stahl 1989 stiglitz 1987 rob 1985 burdett and judd 1983 carlson and mcafee 1983 and wilde and schwartz 1979 6 this article explores the fundamental changes to traditional sequential customer search in posted offer markets when firms have the ability to track customers and price discriminate accordingly using controlled experimental markets we investigate how the ability to track customers and offer differentially informed customers different prices affects the prices that buyers receive in aggregate

did the euro foster online price competition evidence from an international price comparison site i introduction the euro became a reality for consumers in 12 nations on 1 january 2002 when it was introduced for retail transactions in all the participating countries 1 prior to this retail transactions were conducted in local currencies although there were many macroeconomic and political reasons for the implementation of a single currency one consumer based argument made in favor of the euro s introduction was that a single currency would facilitate the transparency of prices across europe and reduce transaction costs associated with currency exchange pedro solbes the european union eu commissioner for economic and financial affairs suggested that trading in the same currency across borders lowers costs while cross border price transparency encourages competition 2 presumably the mechanism that solbes has in mind by which price transparency encourages competition is through increasing the intensity of consumer search across countries internet price comparison sites offer a natural place to look for such effects given that geographic boundaries are irrelevant online and price transparency in this setting makes it fairly easy for consumers to identify bargains and arbitrage price differences within and among eurozone countries 3 in this article we study the dynamics of online retail pricing in the period immediately before and immediately after the retail introduction of the euro to assess its impact using retail price data that we collected from kelkoo the leading internet price comparison site in the eu our analysis is based on a data set that has several features that distinguish it from the extant literature 4 we collected firm and price information from the kelkoo sites in seven eu countries four in the eurozone and three outside it our study focuses on pricing for 28 products across a variety of product categories and price points we obtained price information during a period that straddled the introduction of the euro thus we are able to look at variation both pre and post euro introduction as well as variation between pricing inside and outside the eurozone to our knowledge this is the first study that offers as many cross country comparisons of online prices and covers as broad a range of products 5 we believe this to be one of the first academic studies regarding the impact of the euro on retail pricing 6 by including four eurozone and three non eurozone countries in the study we examine what some might view as a natural experiment on the impact of this important monetary reform on pricing behavior we recognize that there are differing views of the relevant transaction price to use in comparing prices in online markets some have taken the position that identical products sold by different firms in online markets are homogeneous and therefore that a majority of consumers using a price comparison site will purchase at the minimum listed price see baye and morgan 2001 in this case the relevant price to compare pre and post euro is the minimum price on the other hand one might reasonably argue that price differences for identical products stem from heterogeneities in service or reputations and that firms charging higher prices also enjoy sales note the work of narasimhan 1988 pan et al 2001 and baye et al 2004 in this case the natural comparison is the average price charged by all firms in the market the absence of sales data precludes us from discriminating between these two extreme views therefore we study both average and best quoted minimum prices online figure 1 depicts the trend in the difference in prices over time in this figure we plot the difference in the average price and the difference in the average minimum price between the eurozone and the non eurozone on a weekly basis negative numbers indicate that prices in the eurozone are lower than those in the non eurozone and positive figures indicate the reverse

learning in games with unstable equilibria we propose a new concept for the analysis of games the tasp which gives a precise prediction about non equilibrium play in games whose nash equilibria are mixed and are unstable under fictitious play like learning we show that when players learn using weighted stochastic fictitious play and so place greater weight on recent experience the time average of play often converges in these unstable games even while mixed strategies and beliefs continue to cycle this time average the tasp is related to the cycle identified by shapley l s shapley some topics in two person games in m dresher et al eds advances in game theory princeton university press princeton 1964 the tasp can be close to or quite distinct from nash equilibrium

putting on a tight leash and levelling playing field an experiment in strategic obfuscation and consumer protection the paper reports the results of an experiment where asymmetric sellers of a product can obfuscate the market we show that policy measures may have unintended effects of increasing obfuscation incentives we find that policies that limit the effectiveness of obfuscation and policies that promote parity between firms can lead less prominent firms to increase their obfuscation efforts despite this unintended effect however the former type of policies is effective in boosting consumer welfare

popular economy in santiago de chile state of affairs and challenges do informal initiatives share a capitalist spirit of entrepreneurship this article attempts to answer this question using a popular economy analytical framework and focusing on the case of chile first we present the context of the research namely the economic and political evolutions in chile since the 1970s and their effects on the popular economy then we seek to answer the original question relying on in depth case studies of so called popular economy organizations our research shows that their socio economic logics significantly differ from those of the traditional capitalist firm our observations also suggest important differences between current and older initiatives 2014 elsevier ltd

price setting in online markets basic facts international comparisons and cross border integration we document basic facts about prices in online markets in the united states and canada which is a rapidly growing segment of the retail sector relative to prices in regular stores prices in online markets are more flexible and exhibit stronger pass through 60 75 percent and faster convergence half life less than two months in response to movements of the nominal exchange rate multiple margins of adjustment are active in the process of responding to nominal exchange rate shocks properties of goods sellers and markets are systematically related to pass through and the speed of price adjustment for international price differentials

price complexity and buyer confusion in markets abstract this paper reports a duopoly market experiment that examines the effects of price complexity on market prices in my experimental posted offer markets each seller offers an identical good to buyers with homogeneous preferences first sellers simultaneously decide on the price and the tariff structure of their good then buyers make their choices each seller can choose to have a one two or three part tariff the tariff structure affects neither the value nor the price of the good but influences buyers ability to calculate the good s price the main results show that high price sellers choose high complexity more often than low price sellers if buyers are simulated in accordance with the bounded rationality model of carlin 2009 however the evidence for this effect is weaker if the buyers are human subjects importantly prices are higher when the sellers can confuse buyers using price complexity than when sellers interact with perfectly rational robot buyers

an experimental study of price dispersion abstract we report an experiment examining a simple clearinghouse model that generates price dispersion according to this model price dispersion arises because of consumer heterogeneity some consumers are informed and simply buy from the firm offering the lowest price while the remaining consumers are captive and shop based on considerations other than price in our experiment we observe substantial and persistent price dispersion we find that as predicted an increase in the fraction of informed consumers leads to more competitive pricing for all consumers we also find as predicted that when more firms enter the market prices to informed consumers become more competitive while prices to captive customers become less competitive thus our experiment provides strong support for the model s comparative static predictions about how changes in market structure affect pricing

spatial competition with three firms an experimental study the paper reports the results of an experimental study of the three firm location problem we compare the subjects behavior in the experiments with the symmetric mixed strategy nash equilibrium calculated by shaked 1982 overall the findings are consistent with the equilibrium prediction however the subjects locations were significantly more dispersed than predicted by the theory three alternative explanations of this phenomenon inexperience approximate equilibrium behavior and risk aversion are suggested and evaluated for their predictive power special attention is paid to risk aversion

the informational divide we propose a model of price competition where consumers exogenously differ in the number of prices they compare our model can be interpreted either as a non sequential search model or as a network model of price competition we show that i if consumers who previously just sampled one firm start to compare more prices all types of consumers will expect to pay a lower price and ii if consumers who already sampled more than one price sample even more prices then there exists a threshold the informational divide such that all consumers comparing fewer prices than this threshold will expect to pay a higher price whereas all consumers comparing more prices will expect to pay a lower price than before thus increased search can create a negative externality and it is not necessarily beneficial for all consumers

buyer search and price dispersion a laboratory study we study markets with costly buyer search in which sellers simultaneously post prices buyers costlessly observe one or with probability 1 q two of the posted prices and can accept one or pay to search again the experiment varies q the search cost and the number of buyers equilibrium theory predicts a unified very low high price for q 0 q 1 and predicts specific distributions of dispersed prices for q 1 3 and 2 3 actual prices conform closely to the predictions in some treatments buyers reservation prices are biased away from the extremes however and sellers prices have positive autocorrelation and cross sectional correlation

a gendered value chain approach to codes of conduct in african horticulture codes of conduct covering the employment conditions of southern producers exporting to european markets mushroomed throughout the 1990s especially in the horticulture sector linking uk and european supermarkets with export firms in africa the majority of employment in this sector is informal a significant proportion of which is female this paper explores the gender sensitivity of codes currently applied in the african export horticulture sector from an analytical perspective that combines global value chain and gendered economy approaches through an analysis of these two approaches it develops a gender pyramid which provides a framework for mapping and assessing the gender content of codes of conduct the pyramid is applied to codes that cover employment conditions in three commodity groups and countries exporting to european markets south african fruit kenyan flowers and zambian vegetables and flowers it concludes that the gender sensitivity of codes needs to be greatly enhanced if they are to adequately address employment conditions relevant to informal and especially women workers

biases from omitted risk effects in standard gamble utilities utilities elicited under the probability equivalence version of the standard gamble procedure systematically exaggerate the utility increments of expensive health interventions that bring the recipient towards full health switching to the alternative certainty equivalence version would introduce the reverse bias the biases arise from anticipated pre and post decision risk effects that expected utility theory omits to include these risk effects partition the future by changes in knowledge into 1 pre choice periods 2 the pre outcome future before the chosen act s outcome becomes known and 3 the more distant post outcome future when that outcome will have become known

the dynamic instability of dispersed price equilibria abstract we adopt an evolutionary framework to explain price dispersion as a time varying phenomenon by developing a finite strategy analogue of the burdett and judd 1983 price dispersion model we show that all dispersed price equilibria are unstable under the class of perturbed best response dynamics instead numerical simulations using the logit dynamic show that price dispersion manifests itself as a limit cycle we verify that limit cycles persist even when the finite strategy model approaches the original continuous strategy model for a particularly simple case of the model we prove the existence of a limit cycle

information gatekeepers on the internet and the competitiveness of homogeneous product markets we examine the equilibrium interaction between a market for price information controlled by a gatekeeper and the homogenous product market it serves the gatekeeper charges fees to firms that advertise prices on its internet site and to consumers who access the list of advertised prices gatekeeper profits are maximized in an equilibrium where a the product market exhibits price dispersion b access fees are sufficiently low that all consumers subscribe c advertising fees exceed socially optimal levels thus inducing partial firm participation and d advertised prices are below unadvertised prices introducing the market for information has ambiguous social welfare effects

i paid a bribe an experiment on information sharing and extortionary corruption abstract theoretical and empirical research on corruption has flourished in the last three decades however identifying successful anti corruption policies remains a challenge in this paper we ask whether bottom up institutions that rely on voluntary and anonymous reports of bribe demands such as the i paid a bribe website first launched in india in 2010 could act as effective anti corruption tools and if this is the case whether and how their effectiveness could be improved we overcome measurement and identification problems by addressing our research questions in the laboratory our results show that the presence of a reporting platform like the i paid a bribe website may be insufficient to systematically lower bribery a more effective platform is one where posts disclose specific information about the size of the bribes and the location of their requestors i e a platform that could serve as a search engine for the least corrupt officials especially if posting is restricted to service recipients our results also show that while citizens rarely post false information lying by officials when allowed to post on the platform is widespread