neutrality and the private provision of public goods with incomplete information abstract in this paper we introduce incomplete information about income into a standard model of private provision of public goods generally one obtains neutrality results similar in nature to those obtained in the complete information model however with incomplete information several additional difficulties exist in attaining neutrality for neutrality to hold i positive contributions have to be made by all individual types ii any redistribution of income must not convey information to the individuals and iii any redistribution must not depreciate the private information individuals have

a quality adjusted price index for personal computers this study estimates quality adjusted price indexes for personal computers three separate hedonic models are estimated using data from 1 841 personal computers over the period 1984 1991 in addition to the traditional linear model a nonlinear model is developed and estimated the nonlinear model is parsimonious in parameters allows time varying attribute prices and can be estimated using a pooled data set the results indicate that nominal quality adjusted prices of mail order firms declined at an average annual rate of 24 62 quality adjusted prices of major manufacturers declined at a slower rate

asymmetric regulation of identical polluters in oligopoly models studies of optimal second best environmental regulation of identical polluting agents have invariably ignored potentially welfare improving asymmetric regulation by imposing equal regulatory treatment of identical firms at the outset yet cost asymmetry between oligopoly firms may well give rise to private as well as social gains a trade off is demonstrated for the regulator between private costs savings and additional social costs when asymmetric treatment is allowed asymmetry is indeed optimal for a range of plausible parameter values further it is demonstrated that for a broad class of abatement cost functions there is scope for increasing welfare while keeping both total output and total emission constant some motivating policy issues are discussed in light of the results including international harmonization and global carbon dioxide reduction

earthquake fatalities the interaction of nature and political economy to say that the level of fatalities resulting from an earthquake is inversely related to a country s per capita level of income is hardly novel what makes our approach novel is that we relate fatalities to both per capita income and the level of inequality that exists within a country through their joint impact on the likelihood of collective action being taken to mitigate the destructive potential of quakes we first develop a theoretical model which offers an explanation as to why in some environments different segments of society prove incapable of arriving at what all parties perceive to be an agreeable distribution of the burden of the necessary collective action causing the relatively wealthy simply to self insure against the disaster while leaving the relatively poor to its mercy following this we test our theoretical model by evaluating 269 large earthquakes occurring worldwide between 1960 and 2002 taking into account other factors that influence a quake s destructiveness such as its magnitude depth and proximity to population centers using a negative binomial estimation strategy with both random and fixed estimators we find strong evidence of the theoretical model s predictions that is while earthquakes themselves are natural phenomena beyond the reach of humankind our collective inaction with respect to items like the creation and enforcement of building codes failure to retrofit structures and to enact quake sensitive zoning clearly plays a part in determining the actual toll that a given quake takes and it is through these and other examples of collective inaction that limited per capita income and inequality couple together with a given quake s natural destructive power in determining the actual fatalities resulting from a quake

endogenous number of firms horizontal concentration and heterogeneity of firms a note we re examine implications of heterogeneity of firms under a cournot setting on free entry equilibria concerning the number of firms heterogeneity reduces the number of firms in equilibrium the larger the cost asymmetries the smaller the free entry equilibrium number of firms in an industry

unequal treatment of identical agents in cournot equilibrium oligopoly models where prior actions by firms affect subsequent marginal costs have been useful in illuminating policy debates in areas such as antitrust regulation environmental protection and international competition we discuss properties of such models when a cournot equilibrium occurs at the second stage aggregate production costs strictly decline with no change in gross revenue or gross consumer surplus if the prior actions strictly increase the variance of marginal costs without changing the marginal cost sum therefore unless the cost of inducing second stage asymmetry more than offsets this reduction in production costs the private and social optima are asymmetric

emissions trading with profit neutral permit allocations this paper examines the impact of an emissions trading scheme ets on equilibrium emissions output price market concentration and profits in a generalized cournot model we develop formulae for the number of emissions permits that have to be freely allocated to firms to neutralize the profit impact of the ets we show that its profit impact is usually limited in a cournot oligopoly with constant marginal costs total industry profits are preserved so long as freely allocated permits cover a fraction of initial emissions that does not exceed the industry s herfindahl index

the unilateral incentives for technology transfers predation and deterrence by proxy abstract joint production between rival firms often entails knowledge transfers without direct compensation leaving the question as to why more efficient firms would give their rivals such an advantage we find that such transfers are credible mechanisms to make the market more competitive so as to deter entry or force exit we determine that with free entry such transfers are profitable and further it may be optimal to predate or deter every firm possible so that a market with many firms can become a duopoly while consumers are harmed by such action production efficiency normally increases sufficiently so that welfare increases

cost heterogeneity industry concentration and strategic trade policies abstract we show 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 in some cases the direction of optimal policy is reversed

entrepreneurship and uncertainty innovation and competition among the many schumpeter stressed innovation and knight uncertainty as preconditions for entrepreneurship and productivity growth schumpeter emphasized entry in his early work but came to consider incumbent innovation the dominant mode in his later work modern growth theory emphasizes dissemination of knowledge to explain progress in the steady state the paper analyzes the effects of entry market structures and uncertainty on the incidence and diffusion of innovation the insertion of knightian uncertainty in schumpeter s model can explain why innovators are numerous and arrive unexpectedly uncertainty spurs diffusion and improves the utilization of human capital combining the ideas of schumpeter and knight also elucidates several stylized facts of entrepreneurship such as small entry size low chances of survival and high growth rates

monetary policy and natural disasters in a dsge model in the immediate aftermath of hurricane katrina speculation arose that the federal reserve might respond by easing monetary policy this article uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model to investigate the appropriate monetary policy response to a natural disaster we show that the standard taylor rule response in models with and without nominal rigidities is to increase the nominal interest rate that finding is unchanged when we consider the optimal policy response to a disaster a nominal interest rate increase following a disaster mitigates both temporary inflation effects and output distortions that are attributable to nominal rigidities

does rising income increase or decrease damage risk from natural disasters abstract recent empirical literature has found a negative relationship between income per capita and measures of risk from natural disaster supportive of logic that higher incomes allow countries to mitigate disaster risk we argue that behavioral changes at the micro level in response to increasing income such as location choice and extent of costly abatement activity may lead to a non linear relationship between aggregate incomes and disaster damages where the risks increase with income before they decrease in a country year panel data set we show that disaster risk associated with flooding landslides and windstorms increases with income up to gdp per capita levels of 5044 3360 and 4688 per year respectively and decrease thereafter such non linear impacts are absent for other disaster types such as extreme temperature events and earthquakes where the links between human behavioral choices and exposure to risk are not as strong from a policy perspective this suggests that for the least developed countries the dual goals of disaster risk prevention and economic development cannot be assumed to be complementary for all forms of natural disaster in addition to allocating resources to manage disaster risk the poorest nations may have to be more proactive in enacting policies that alter the behavioral choices of citizens that impact a country s exposure to natural disaster risk

buying ecological services nature s harmonies fragmented reserves and the agricultural extensification debate growing demand for cropland products has placed intense pressure on the ability of land resources to support nature straining public budgets to purchase environmental goods fixing overall agricultural output two policy options are whether to promote more extensive and nature friendly farming practices or to produce intensively on some land and leave the rest wild microeconomic models of the topic have not accommodated widely recognized complementary spatial externalities in providing ecological services this article does so identifying also a third policy possibility this is that environmental services can follow a smoothly varying spatial path characterized by harmonic functions

innovation and price the case of digital cameras this study examines a hedonic regression model of digital camera prices using data collected from an internet price comparison service we find that a small number of product characteristics explains most of the variation in camera prices in addition the model demonstrates substantial downward pressure on camera prices during the time period considered we also examine technological innovation shocks to determine their impact on product prices we find that the corresponding price reaction exhibits gradual adjustment over time providing evidence of some degree of anticipation of the innovation as well as a post innovation price shock this study also demonstrates the power of web based shopping services as a new and novel source of data for econometric analysis

optimal asymmetric strategies in research joint ventures abstract this paper identifies an overlooked implication of models of research joint ventures initiated by d aspremont and jacquemin 1988 even though the aggregate r d cost of identical firms in a research joint venture would be lowest if they invested equally to reduce subsequent production costs nonetheless members may often enlarge their overall joint profit by making unequal investments such a strategy raises costs in the investment stage but may create more than offsetting benefits in the production stage since industry profits are larger there when the firms are of unequal size when the consideration leading to asymmetry prevails we find that in contrast to previous work a research joint venture can raise welfare even when there are no spillovers

are external shocks responsible for the instability of output in low income countries external shocks such as commodity price fluctuations natural disasters and the role of the international economy are often blamed for the poor economic performance of low income countries the author quantifies the impact of these different external shocks using a panel vector autoregression var approach and compares their relative contributions to output volatility in low income countries vis a vis internal factors he finds that external shocks can only explain a small fraction of the output variance of a typical low income country internal factors are the main source of fluctuations from a quantitative perspective the output effect of external shocks is typically small in absolute terms but significant relative to the historic performance of these countries

cost manipulation games in oligopoly with costs of manipulating we analyze a class of two stage games where rival firms incur real resource costs in manipulating their marginal costs so as to influence the outcome of the game they want to play in stage two marginal costs may be manipulated by various means such as redistribution of productive assets choice of location or creation of an internal input market a general formulation of the game is provided and several applications are analyzed we show that the optimal allocation of resources within an oligopoly can be asymmetric even for ex ante symmetric firms this is an additional explanation of heterogeneity in oligopoly

computers skills and wages computer technology is most prominently used by skilled high wage workers this suggests that computer use requires skills to take full advantage of the possibilities which are particularly present among relatively skilled workers this article develops a simple technology adoption model showing that the decision to adopt computer technology depends on i the tasks to be performed ii the level of skill or education and iii the level of wages applying this model to british data it is shown that the effect of wages and particular tasks on computer adoption is larger than the effect of skills on adoption the estimates suggest that in britain computer use is likely to be a matter of cost efficiency and not so much of workers skills

a theory of oil igopoly cournot equilibrium in exhaustible resource markets with fixed supplies the emergence of an effective and powerful cartel in the international petroleum market has stimulated considerable effort among economists to develop models of pricing and supply behavior for this industry 2 this modeling task poses two basic difficulties first as in the standard oligopoly problem one must characterize the behavior of several sellers in a market aware of each other and of their effect on market price second there is here the added difficulty of treating the explicitly intertemporal nature of suppliers decision wherein a limited stock must be optimally allocated over time this paper studies the implications of the simplest non trivial postulates about these two aspects of the problem it is assumed that suppliers are non cooperative cournot nash players each of whom is imagined to select an optimal supply strategy taking as given the strategies of the others moreover it is hypothesized that the feasible strategies are limited to open loop paths chosen at the initial date to maximize the present value of profits in light of the paths of supply which the others have chosen 3 these basic postulates together with a few technical assumptions concerning the structure of resource demand permit one to demonstrate the existence of at least one non cooperative equilibrium concerning thisequilibrium we show that 1 the average and marginal return on resource stocks is inversely related to the size of a player s initial endowment 2 aggregate production decreases over time until all stocks are exhausted while firms with smaller stocks exhaust their supplies no later than firms with larger stocks do 3 the present value of price net of extraction cost declines over time 4 industry production maximizes a weighted average of intertemporal consumer s surplus and producers profits

a curvature condition ensuring uniqueness of cournot equilibrium with applications to comparative statics abstract we study a curvature condition on demands that with a cost assumption ensures the uniqueness of cournot equilibrium for two firms the condition is that industry marginal revenue rises no faster than price falls the condition is weaker with more firms and holds for any smooth demand curve provided there are enough firms

the power of money wealth effects in contests abstract the relationship between wealth and power has long been debated nevertheless this relationship has been rarely studied in a strategic game in this paper we study wealth effects in a strategic contest game two opposing effects arise wealth reduces the marginal cost of effort but it also reduces the marginal benefit of winning the contest we consider three types of contests which vary depending on whether rents and efforts are commensurable with wealth our theoretical analysis shows that the effects of wealth are strongly contest dependent it thus does not support general claims that the rich lobby more or that low economic growth and wealth inequality spur conflicts

an analysis of cooperative research and development i analyze the effects of cooperative research whereby member firms agree to share the costs andfruits of a research project before they undertake it in this model industrywide agreements tend to have socially beneficial effects when the degree ofproduct market competition is low when there are r d spillovers in the absence of cooperation when a high degree of sharing is technologically feasible and when the agreement concerns basic research rather than development activities i show that a royalty free cross licensing agreement among any number offirms lowers the equilibrium level of innovation even though it increases the efficiency of r d through sharing

noncooperative versus cooperative r d with endogenous spillover rates this paper deals with a general version of a two stage model of r d and product market competition we provide a thorough generalization of previous results on the comparative performance of noncooperative and cooperative r d dispensing in particular with ex post firm symmetry and linear demand assumptions we also characterize the structure of profit maximizing r d cartels where firms competing in a product market jointly decide r d expenditure as well as internal spillover levels we establish the firms would essentially always prefer extremal spillovers and within the context of a standard specification derive conditions for the optimality of minimal spillover

when is efficiency separable from distribution in the provision of club goods abstract using the homogeneous of degree zero inverse congestion quality function employed most frequently in the literature we characterise completely the families of utility functions which are then necessary and sufficient for break even utilitarian welfare maximising provision of club goods with self selection to be separable from distribution two types of separation involving alternatively a the price and quality b the price quality facility size and total utilisation are considered when separation is possible utility functions and optimal decisions take simple intuitive forms our results extend the scope of separation results previously obtained only for pure public goods journal of economic literature classification numbers d62 h23 h40

misleading advertising in duopoly this paper builds a model of strategic misleading advertising in duopolistic markets with horizontal product differentiation and advertising externality between firms we investigate the effects of regulating misinformation on market competition behaviour of firms and social welfare we show that the degree of advertising externality and the magnitude of advertising costs are crucial for determining the welfare effects of several regulations including prohibiting misleading advertising educating consumers taxing production and taxing misleading advertising we extend the model by introducing heterogeneous consumers heterogeneous production costs between firms and the degree of advertising informativeness our results have important policy implications for the debate regarding regulation of advertising especially direct to consumer advertising for prescription and over the counter drugs ce texte construit un modele de publicite mensongere strategique dans des marches duopolistiques ou il y a differentiation horizontale des produits et externalites de publicite entre firmes on examine les effets d une reglementation de la desinformation sur la concurrence dans le marche sur le comportement des firmes et sur le bien etre social on montre que le degre d externalites de la publicite et la magnitude des couts de publicite sont des elements cruciaux pour determiner les effets de bien etre de plusieurs reglementations y compris prohiber la publicite mensongere eduquer les consommateurs taxer la production et taxer la publicite mensongere on developpe le modele pour prendre en compte les consommateurs heterogenes des couts de production heterogenes entre firmes et le contenu informationnel de la publicite ces resultats ont des implications importantes pour la politique publique dans les debats concernant la reglementation de la publicite en particulier la publicite directe au consommateur pour les medicaments avec et sans ordonnance

natural disasters impact factors of resilience and development a meta analysis of the macroeconomic literature abstract we systematize 64 primary studies published in 2000 2013 on the macroeconomic impact of natural disasters by providing ols and generalized ordered probit meta analyses for 1858 and 1991 regressions respectively we investigate how the reported results in the primary studies are influenced by the empirical design the estimation technique and or publication bias we analyze primary studies on disaster direct costs and indirect costs separately according to our meta analysis disasters on average have a negative impact in terms of direct costs and an insignificant impact in terms of indirect costs mst and fat pet peese estimates motivate the meta analyses showing the need for a multivariate approach to consider strong systematic research heterogeneity time based characteristics of the data and publication bias strongly impact on the results of the primary studies thus implying the need for authors to carefully consider the selection of time period and for research institutions to understand the sources of selection bias in disseminated results we argue that further research is necessary on the heterogeneity of results of indirect cost studies and suggest that future studies on the macroeconomic impact of disasters should explore more often the mitigation role of education investment and openness by including these as explanatory variables

natural disasters and foreign direct investment the world s population has witnessed the concurrence of two powerful global trends an unprecedented growth in foreign direct investment fdi and an increase in natural disasters since investment decisions are based on an evaluation of expected risks and returns we consider whether fdi decisions are influenced by natural disasters we do so by considering the relation between fdi in 94 countries between 1984 and 2004 and the number of disasters striking those countries across a variety of empirical tests that control for two way fixed effects we find natural disasters to be negatively and statistically significantly associated with a country s fdi

technology asymmetries group algebra and multiplant cost minimization for a homogeneous good this article studies firm level production activities when the firm controls a plural number of plants through careful construction of cost function technology asymmetries we inquire into the ordinal structure of the production vector for multiplant cost minimizers when schur convexity of a reference pseudo cost technology is the principal functional assumption then ordinal concepts of technical asymmetries map into rank order on the equilibrium production vector under a more generalized characterization of the technical asymmetries a multiplant firm encounters group theory is used to map a cardinal concept of asymmetries into cardinal bounds on the optimum allocation

faraway so close coupled climate and economic dynamics in an agent based integrated assessment model abstract in this work we develop an agent based model that offers an alternative to standard computable general equilibrium integrated assessment models iams the dystopian schumpeter meeting keynes dsk model is composed of heterogeneous firms belonging to capital good consumption good and energy sectors production and energy generation lead to greenhouse gas emissions which affect temperature dynamics climate damages are modelled at the individual level as stochastic shocks hitting workers labour productivity energy efficiency capital stock and inventories of firms in that aggregate damages emerge from the aggregation of losses suffered by heterogeneous interacting and boundedly rational agents the model is run focusing on a business as usual carbon intensive scenario consistent with a representative concentration pathway 8 5 we find that the dsk model is able to account for a wide ensemble of micro and macro empirical regularities concerning both economic and climate dynamics simulation experiments show a substantial lack of isomorphism between the effects of micro and macro level shocks as it is typical in complex system models in particular different types of shocks have heterogeneous impact on output growth unemployment rate and the likelihood of economic crises pointing to the importance of the different economic channel affected by the shock overall we report much larger climate damages than those projected by standard iams under comparable scenarios suggesting possible shifts in the growth dynamics from a self sustained pattern to stagnation and high volatility and the need of urgent policy interventions

partial vertical ownership abstract a backward ownership interest held by a downstream firm yields a partial rebate of the upstream margin input demand increases with backward ownership and the upstream firm optimally responds by raising price with symmetric costs every downstream firm s equilibrium input output choice is invariant across a class of ownership profiles including uniform ownership moreover equity trading results in uniform holdings so partial vertical ownership may have no real effects with asymmetric costs ex ante equity trading amplifies the asymmetries and shifts output toward lower cost firms with homogeneous goods this improves producer and total surplus with differentiated goods it may harm consumers

impure public goods and transfers in a three agent model abstract this paper extends previous models of non cooperative private funding of pure public goods by allowing for impure public goods the analysis is developed in the context of international public goods under certain conditions the consequences of transfers on utility are paradoxical if the preferences are divergent a country may gain by giving a transfer the receiver may lose and these two phenomena may appear at the same time

two remarks on cournot equilibria abstract we describe two simple results in the theory of cournot equilibria the first has to do with the effect of taxation in a cournot industry and the second describes under what conditions a cournot equilibrium will implicity maximize an objective function these results are probably known but are not well known and they seem useful enough to be worth spelling out

oligopoly and welfare a unified presentation with applications to trade and development abstract we develop a unified sequence of models to examine the determinants of price output profitability and concentration for different kinds of oligopolistic market we relate various magnitudes of significance to judges of welfare and to policy makers such as consumer surplus profit or added benefits of employment or trade surplus to observable magnitudes such as the size and concentration of the market it emerges that various appropriately formulated herfindahl indices are useful in several of these relations we attempt to present results in a way that is useful for empirical investigations and pay particular attention to applications in trade and development

hedonic price indexes and the distribution of buyers across the product space an application to mainframe computers 2000 hedonic price indexes and the distribution of buyers across the product space an application to mainframe computers applied economics vol 32 no 14 pp 1801 1808

symmetric research joint ventures cooperative substitutes and complements we introduce the concepts of cooperative substitutes and complements and use them to explain when all firms in a research joint venture will choose equal levels of r d we show that the second order conditions for a symmetric optimum take a particularly simple form ruling out both excessive cooperative substitutability and excessive cooperative complementarity and nesting conditions already derived in the literature finally we apply our results to the comparison between cooperative and non cooperative r d and show in an important special case that asymmetric outcomes are only optimal for a very limited range of parameter values

on the effects of the distribution of initial endowments in a nonrenewable resource duopoly abstract this paper studies the effects on equilibrium output and profits of modifying the resource endowments in a nonrenewable resource duopoly when the firms equilibrium terminal dates may differ

the macroeconomic impacts of natural disasters the case of floods we use panel vector autoregression models to trace the dynamic response of output growth to flood shocks using new data on large flood events in 135 countries between 1985 and 2008 flood shocks tend to have a positive and significant average impact on per capita gdp growth however this effect is limited to developing countries and to moderate floods the positive impact of floods is larger and more significant in the agricultural sector while floods seem to have a direct effect on agricultural growth rates in developing countries their effect on nonagricultural growth rates is mainly indirect jel o11 q54

generics and new goods in pharmaceutical price indexes drug prices and their rate of inflation are a major focus of current policy debates on u s health care in this paper we show that where patent expiration and generic entry are significant as they are for many important classes of drugs movements in the official price indexes may be poor indicators of the actual prices paid and the resulting changes in consumer welfare when a drug goes off patent those consumers who regard the branded and generic versions as more or less perfect substitutes experience a substantial price decline and concomitant welfare gain which the current methods used by the statistical agencies fail to capture we suggest a number of alternative ways of proceeding although our computations are based on a limited number of cases they imply that the overall rate of inflation in drug prices may be quite seriously overstated while generic pharmaceuticals are the topic of our calculations the problem discussed is also of wider importance generic drugs are a special and possibly easy case

a free lunch in the commons we derive conditions under which raising costs through a regulatory constraint or a fully expropriated tax can increase the profits arising from a common pool resource the basic model assumes a fixed number of identical agents with linear costs selling in a single period at an exogenous price a necessary and sufficient condition for a cost increase to be profitable is that aggregate output from the resource be locally convex in aggregate effort we also show that cost increases can be profitable even if price is endogenous agents are heterogeneous entry is costless or agents are playing a markov perfect equilibrium of a dynamic game we also discuss more general welfare implications of the result along with its relation to existing results for a cournot oligopoly

input price discrimination with downstream cournot competitors abstract this paper addresses third degree price discrimination in input markets i decompose the upstream monopolist s profit into two parts one that depends on average input prices and one that depends on their distribution this decomposition is useful in comparing the welfare properties of price discrimination against uniform pricing under reasonable assumptions input price discrimination negatively affects both consumer surplus and total welfare

the growth aftermath of natural disasters this paper provides a description of the macroeconomic aftermath of natural disasters it traces the yearly response of gross domestic product growth both aggregated and disaggregated into its agricultural and non agricultural components to four types of natural disasters droughts floods earthquakes and storms the paper uses a methodological approach based on pooling the experiences of various countries over time it consists of vector auto regressions in the presence of endogenous variables and exogenous shocks varx applied to a panel of cross country and time series data the analysis finds heterogeneous effects on a variety of dimensions first the effects of natural disasters are stronger for better or worse on developing than on rich countries second while the impact of some natural disasters can be beneficial when they are of moderate intensity severe disasters never have positive effects third not all natural disasters are alike in terms of the growth response they induce and perhaps surprisingly some can entail benefits regarding economic growth thus droughts have a negative effect on both agricultural and non agricultural growth in contrast floods tend to have a positive effect on economic growth in both major sectors earthquakes have a negative effect on agricultural growth but a positive one on non agricultural growth storms tend to have a negative effect on gross domestic product growth but the effect is short lived and small future research should concentrate on exploring the mechanisms behind these heterogeneous impacts

sampling frequency and the comparison between matched model and hedonic regression price indexes matched model price indexes generally overestimate quality adjusted prices because the price performance ratio of models sold in consecutive periods is worse than that of new models this unrepresentativeness of the sample potentially might be reduced by obtaining higher frequency data thus increasing the fraction of models that are matched we propose a set of comformable indexes to test this hypothesis using computer prices from the buy direct press we find contrary to initial expectations that the bias in the matched model price index increases with the sampling frequency the bias is reduced if the high frequency index is constructed using only long lived models these results suggest that models that last for only a brief time are models for which the price performance ratio has deteriorated very rapidly thus increasing the sampling frequency without purging short lived models actually increases the selection bias

tariffs and the most favored nation clause abstract in an n country oligopoly model of intraindustry trade n 3 this paper explores the economics of the most favored nation mfn principle under the non cooperative tariff equilibrium each country imposes higher tariffs on low cost producers relative to high cost ones thereby causing socially harmful trade diversion mfn adoption by each country improves world welfare by eliminating this trade diversion under linear demand mfn adoption by the country with the average production cost is most desirable high cost countries refuse reciprocal mfn adoption with other countries and also lose even if others engage in reciprocal mfn adoption amongst themselves

when are nash equilibria independent of the distribution of agents characteristics author s bergstrom ted varian hal r abstract we present examples of nash equilibria that do not vary with the distribution of a parameter across agents and then offer a general theorem that characterizes this independence

what to show on the wine labels a hedonic analysis of price drivers of sicilian wines unlike previous literature we construct a hedonic model of wine price that incorporates all the main categories of variables simultaneously to enable a better evaluation of their importance on wine price formation a comprehensive model has the advantage of providing more reliable estimates of the attributes implicit prices thereby facilitating firms pricing and improving effectiveness of wine production and marketing decisions we utilize two different datasets of sicilian wines collecting data from influential wine guides our results suggest that wine price strongly depends on objective features such as vintage alcoholic content geographical origin grape variety producer size and cellaring potential in addition use of containers like tonneaux and barrique positively affects prices whereas use of concrete containers has a negative influence no univocal indications emerge with regard to the effect of the type of company type of viticulture and firm age as for sensorial characteristics our a

optimal production of transplant care services most organ transplants are from dead donors national transplant organizations exhibit considerable differences in terms of their donor population rates spain s organization is by far the most efficient in this respect we argue that much of the productivity advantage of spain s transplant organization proceeds from an efficient organization of the production chain from organ procurement to transplantation transplants from dead donors are analogous to a common resource for the transplant community their circulation through the national transplant organization creates public good externalities between the care units in charge of organ retrieval and those in charge of transplantation a socially efficient production of transplant care services obtains through an optimal control by the national transplant agency of both the circulation and the production of transplants in particular transplant shortage makes the rotten kid theorem fail in this context the analysis also produces a natural measure of public good externalities evaluated from the standpoint of care units

hedonic prices and implicit markets estimating demand and supply functions for differentiated products in choosing the level of quality to purchase the buyer of a differentiated product also chooses a point on the marginal price schedule for that product hence in general the demand functions for product characteristics cannot be consistently estimated by ordinary least squares market equilibrium results in a matching of characteristics of demanders and suppliers this matching restricts the use of buyer and seller characteristics as instruments when estimating demand and supply functions for product characteristics the paper develops these issues a stochastic structure for hedonic equilibrium models is then proposed identification results are presented and estimation procedures are outlined