estimates of the returns to quality and coauthorship in economic academia salaries of academic economists are studied to determine if individuals receive differential returns to publishing articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus single authored articles estimates based on detailed data and a flexible nonlinear least squares procedure indicate that substantial returns to quality exist and that an individual s return from a coauthored paper with n authors is approximately 1 n times that of a single authored paper

patterns of co authorship among economics departments in the usa given the steady increase in co authored papers in economics journals this paper reports a study of the patterns of co authorship between us universities and colleges a majority of institutions produce more co authored than single authored papers contacts with researchers from the same institution are still an important source of co authored papers even though slightly decreasing in frequency the determinants of co authorship outside the own institution are tested in a gravity model and it is found that distance and other geographical variables do not matter however the quality of co authors institutions measured by rankings of institutions has a significant impact on the number of co authored papers in top economics journals

existence of equilibrium and comparative statics in differentiated goods cournot oligopolies abstract we show that under horizontal differentiation pure symmetric cournot equilibria exist if firms react to a rise in competitors output in such a way that their market price does not rise this condition is related to strategic complementarity but not to convexity or differentiability we rule out multiple equilibria under some additional conditions and discuss stability and regularity of equilibria with ordinal methods following entry equilibrium price decreases only if competitors outputs enter inverse demand aggregated into a single number otherwise it may increase even in stable equilibria the comparative statics of quantities and profits for all equilibria are given

expanding demand through price advertisement abstract retail stores frequently advertise prices when consumer search is costly advertising low prices expands the number of consumers who visit and buy we show that this demand enhancement may offset a retailer s loss in margins from the low price making advertisement desirable we further show that a multi product monopolist may choose to advertise low prices only for select products even when advertised and non advertised products are substitutes for duopolist retailers at a common location an equilibrium exists in which for some range of advertising costs one store advertises and the other free rides on its competitor

what are the top five journals in economics a new meta ranking abstractwe construct a meta ranking of 277 economics journals based on 22 different rankings the ranking incorporates bibliometric indicators from four different databases web of science scopus google scholar and repec we account for the different scaling of the bibliometric indicators by standardizing each ranking score we run a principal component analysis to assign weights to each ranking in our meta ranking the top five journals are given by quarterly journal of economics journal of financial economics journal of economic literature jel journal of finance and econometrica additionally leaving out the jel as a survey journal and the finance journals in our top 10 list we confirm the perceived top five journals in the economics profession

strategic pricing with customer rationing the case of primary metals firms in primary metal industries often charge subcompetitive prices and in periods of high demand they may ration their customers a model is developed to ex plain these empirical regularities in the model firms with market power are aware that the price they charge today affects their demand tomorrow in addition the strategic interaction among firms reinforces this intertemporal effect in the equilibrium of the two stage game oligopolists can price below marginal cost and when capacity constraints are introduced the equilibrium can involve rationing model predictions are assessed using market structure and technology data for several primary metal industries

aggregation of information in large cournot markets consider a homogeneous product market where firms have private information about an uncertain demand parameter and compete in quantities we examine the convergence properties of bayesian cournot equilibria as the economy is replicated and conclude that large cournot or almost competitive markets do not aggregate information efficiently except possibly when the production technology exhibits constant returns to scale even in a competitive market there is a welfare loss with respect to the first best outcome due to incomplete information in general nevertheless a competitive market is efficient taking as given the decentralized private information structure of the economy endogenous and costly information acquisition is examined and seen to imply that the market outcome always falls short of the first best level with decreasing returns to scale the results are also shown to be robust to the addition of extra rounds of competition which allows firms to use the information revealed by past prices explicit closed form solutions yielding comparative static results are obtained for models characterized by quadratic payoffs and affine information structures

trends in rankings of economics departments in the u s an update economics departments in the u s are ranked based on 1 the number of pages published in thirty six economics journals 2 publications in five of the top journals 3 output per faculty member and 4 an index of the concentration of research in a department evidence shows that the top twenty departments have generally retained their positions since the 1970s but rather large changes have occurred in departments ranked from 240 to 100 an economists hall of fame is developed listing the top fifty individual producers of research in the thirty six journal set and the top five journals

the voluntary approach to externality problems an experimental test abstract an experiment to test the two coasian propositions conducted at the university of arizona using students as subjects is reported experimental conditions included incomplete information and economic liability rules the experimental results statistically support the efficiency proposition support for the neutrality proposition arises in the case of long time negotiations behavioral findings such as altruism and other interesting results are discussed together with their practical implications

an economics journals ranking that takes into account the number of pages and co authors in this article i examine whether the academics reward policy must correlate positively with the published number of articles per co author number of pages and journals reputation this is accomplished by estimating a nonlinear model with a panel data from 168 economics journals covered in the isi web of knowledge database 58 825 articles the data reinforces the conjecture that published article value is slightly increasing with the number of co authors and is proportional to the number of pages the data also suggests that there are four distinct groups related to journal quality that i name a b b and b

competitive price discrimination we model firms as supplying utility directly to consumers the equilibrium outcome of competition in utility space depends on the relationship u between profit and average utility per consumer public policy constraints on the deals firms may offer affect equilibrium outcomes via their effect on u f rom this perspective we examine the profit utility and welfare implications of price discrimination policies in an oligopolistic framework we also show that an equilibrium outcome of competitive nonlinear pricing when consumers have private information about their tastes is for firms to offer efficient two part tariffs

what does an oligopoly maximize a monopolist maximizes a well defined objective function monetary profit in a competitive industry although each individual pursues selfish objectives the market behaves as if an agent was maximizing an objective function social welfare can we say the same for an oligopoly do firms pursuing selfish objectives and behaving strategically act as if an agent was maximizing a fictitious objective function necessary and sufficient conditions for nash equilibria of static and state space games to be observationally equivalent to single optimization problems are derived nash equilibria of the game that are not maxima of the function are shown to be generically unstable copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

revealed preference for economics journals citations as dollar votes there are several measures which can be used to evaluate professional regard for economics journals in this paper i have focused on citations as a proxy for quality of material published as revealed preference for the journals the availability of the social sciences citation index has permitted construction of a relative rating system for economics journals based on citations which was virtually impossible for previous researchers to achieve while the potential objections to using citations as a proxy have been admitted the proxy is still a useful one one that reveals preferences for the top economics journals much as dollars reveal preferences in product markets

multiproduct pricing made simple we study pricing by multiproduct firms in the context of unregulated monopoly regulated monopoly and cournot oligopoly using the concept of consumer surplus as a function of quantities rather than prices we present simple formulas for optimal prices and show that cournot equilibrium exists and corresponds to a ramsey optimum we then present a tractable class of demand systems that involve a generalized form of homothetic preferences as well as standard homothetic preferences this class includes linear and logit demand within the class profit maximizing quantities are proportional to efficient quantities we discuss cost passthrough including cases where optimal prices do not depend on other products costs finally we discuss optimal monopoly regulation when the firm has private information about its vector of marginal costs and show that if the probability distribution over costs satisfies an independence property then optimal regulation leaves relative price decisions to the firm

exhaustible resources non convexity and competitive equilibrium theoretical underpinnings of competitive equilibrium in an exhaustible resource market with non convex u shaped costs are proposed the analysis extends to intertemporal production novshek and sonnenschein s approximation of static competitive equilibrium by limits of cournot equilibria a problem with using novshek and sonnenschein s method is that oligopolistic equilibrium even an open loop equilibrium to which limits might be applied does not exist when there is a non convex technology using epsilon equilibrium as the equilibrium concept finesses this problem there are two types of limiting competitive equilibrium a third type of competitive equilibrium that has been prominent in the literature is found to be inconsistent with limiting approximations

on input market surplus and its relation to the downstream market game in order to analyze the welfare effects of price changes in input markets following for example a price fixing conspiracy economists have studied the relationship between the surplus measured in the input markets and the surplus in the output markets the latest results hinge on simplifying assumptions which are relaxed here by linking the input markets surplus question to another stream of literature which characterizes functions that oligopolists collectively yet unintentionally maximize it is shown that the area under the input demands is equal to the change in a function for which critical points coincide with the equilibria of the downstream game a particular case of these functions is the exact potential function afin d analyser les effets de bien etre des changements de prix dans le marche des intrants a la suite par exemple d une conspiration pour fixer les prix les economistes ont etudie la relation entre le surplus mesure dans les marches des intrants et le surplus dans les marches des produits les derniers resultats dependent de postulats simplificateurs qu on relaxe ici en reliant la question du surplus dans les marches des intrants avec un autre courant de la litterature specialisee qui caracterise les fonctions que les oligopoleurs collectivement mais sans en faire leur but avoue maximisent on montre que l espace sous les courbes de demandes des intrants est egal au changement dans une fonction pour laquelle les points critiques coincident avec les equilibres dans le jeu de marche en aval un cas particulier de ces fonctions est la fonction potentielle exacte

the effect of myopia and loss aversion on risk taking an experimental test myopic loss aversion is the combination of a greater sensitivity to losses than to gains and a tendency to evaluate outcomes frequently two implications of myopic loss aversion are tested experimentally 1 investors who display myopic loss aversion will be more willing to accept risks if they evaluate their investments less often 2 if all payoffs are increased enough to eliminate losses investors will accept more risk in a task in which investors learn from experience both predictions are supported the investors who got the most frequent feedback and thus the most information took the least risk and earned the least money language en

bargaining in the absence of property rights an experiment abstractthe coase theorem posits that if 1 property rights are perfect 2 contracts are perfectly enforceable 3 transaction costs are zero 4 preferences are common knowledge and 5 parties are rational then the initial allocation of entitlements matters only for distribution not for efficiency we study in an experimental setting whether condition 1 is necessary our results suggest that property rights have a limited effect on efficiency

imitators and optimizers in cournot oligopoly we analyze a symmetric n firm cournot oligopoly with a heterogeneous popu lation of optimizers and imitators imitators mimic the output decision of the most successful firms of the previous round a la vega redondo 1997 optimizers play a myopic best response to the opponents previous output firms are allowed to make mistakes and deviate from the decision rules with a small probability apply ing stochastic stability analysis we find that the long run distribution converges to a recurrent set of states in which imitators are better o than are optimizers this finding appears to be robust even when optimizers are more sophisticated it suggests that imitators drive optimizers out of the market contradicting a funda mental conjecture by friedman 1953

the effect of gender sorting on propensity to coauthor implications for academic promotion a cohort sample of ph d economists indicates a significant propensity for researchers to select coauthors of the same sex this gender sorting contributes to lower article production for women further we find evidence of bias in academic promotion when single authored and coauthored articles carry the same weight in promotion and salary decisions the evidence explains in part why women academics wait longer for promotion and are not as likely to be promoted as men among the effects of gender sorting is self selection of women into larger departments where they are more likely to find colleagues of the same sex

first author conditions evidence from finance journal coauthorship we study the trend and the author name ordering rule in finance publication using the publication records of 21 core finance journals during the period from 1990 to 2004 we empirically model the underlying factors that affect the alphabetical ordering rule among multi authored finance articles we find that the choice of alphabetical ordering is based on the quality of the article institutional heterogeneity team size and cultural factors the central argument rests upon the need to signal and the importance of signalling within the context of bargaining behaviour among coauthors the probability of choosing alphabetical name ordering rule is associated with high article quality higher ranked institutions smaller research team and the presence of european authors

noisy directional learning and the logit equilibrium we specify a dynamic model in which agents adjust their decisions toward higher payoffs subject to normal error this process generates a probability distribution of players decisions that evolves over time according to the fokker planck equation the dynamic process is stable for all potential games a class of payoff structures that includes several widely studied games in equilibrium the distributions that determine expected payoffs correspond to the distributions that arise from the logit function applied to those expected payoffs this logit equilibrium forms a stochastic generalization of the nash equilibrium and provides a possible explanation of anomalous laboratory data

irreversible investment under uncertainty in oligopoly abstract an oligopoly is studied where firms facing a stochastic inverse demand curve use capacity as strategic variable capacity may be adjusted continuously over time with linear cost the analysis uses the technique of a fictitious social planner and the theory of irreversible investment under uncertainty examples indicate that qualitatively the price process will be similar in oligopoly and competitive equilibrium when firms are nonidentical e g in initial size and even if they are alike in other respects substantial time may pass until they are all the same size much of that time one firm may dominate the market

mergers brand competition and the price of a pint abstract mergers in the uk brewing industry have reduced the number of national brewers from six to four the number of brands in contrast has remained relatively constant we analyze the effects of mergers on brand competition and pricing brand level demand equations are estimated from a panel of draft beers to model brand substitution possibilities we estimate the matrix of cross price elasticities semiparametrically our structural model is used to assess the strength of brand competition along various dimensions and to evaluate the mergers in particular we compute equilibria of pricing games with different numbers of players

the relative impacts of economics journals 1970 1990 our data collection and database assembly efforts were assisted by john p sophocleus mark gwartney michele butler and scott ralston we received extremely valuable computer programming assistance from jon brunson and edward novak constructive comments were receivedfrom two anonymous reviewers financial supportfrom the faculty development committee at salisbury state university is gratefully acknowledged

the lottery contest is a best response potential game it is shown that the n player lottery contest admits a best response potential voorneveld 2000 this is true also when the contest technology reflects the possibility of a draw the result implies in particular the existence of a non trivial two player zero sum game that is best response equivalent to a game with identical payoff functions

the institutional concentration of authors in top journals of economics during the last two decades this paper addresses the institutional concentration of authors in 15 top economics journals from 1977 to 1997 the concentration of authors phd affiliations is substantially higher than the concentration of authors current affiliations relating input indicators such as population number of universities with economics departments or manpower in economics to publication output reduces the us dominance considerably whereas israel and the united kingdom come out excellently exporters and importers of phds among universities are identified concentration ratios like the herfindahl index lack a clear time trend nevertheless the position of the united states has been weakening in recent years

option exercise games an application to the equilibrium investment strategies of firms under the standard real options approach to investment under uncertainty agents formulate optimal exercise strategies in isolation and ignore competitive interactions however in many real world asset markets exercise strategies cannot be determined separately but must be formed as part of a strategic equilibrium this article provides a tractable approach for deriving equilibrium investment strategies in a continuous time cournot nash framework the impact of competition on exercise strategies is dramatic for example while standard real options models emphasize that a valuable option to wait leads firms to invest only at large positive net present values the impact of competition drastically erodes the value of the option to wait and leads to investment at very near the zero net present value threshold copyright 2002 oxford university press

a note on prudencio s experimental tests of the coase propositions abstract the purpose of this note is to review prudencio s recent experimental test of the coasian propositions of neutrality and efficiency his conclusion that the propositions are statistically supported by the experimental results is not substantiated a careful examination of the design and methodology of the experiment leads to the conclusion that the experimental bargaining cannot be considered voluntary and that the results are likely to be influenced by hypothetical bias other problems with the representativeness of prudencio s participants are also discussed

an experimental investigation of transaction costs abstract this research builds on hoffman and spitzer 1982 and 1986 and coursey hoffman and spitzer 1987 and investigates how transaction costs may alter price patterns and economic efficiency in markets sixteen experimental markets were conducted which were designed to have different levels of transaction costs the transaction costs were of two types either as a consequence of strategic price setting due to potential holdouts or due to the number of traders who had to contract to trigger a synergistic payoff the results of the markets indicated that transaction costs had the anticipated influence on the price patterns and the efficiency of the markets

trends in co authorship in economics since 1985 it has been often noted mcdowell and melvin 1983 barnett et al 1988 piette and ross 1992 sutter and kocher 2004 that the share of co authored papers in economics has been increasing steadily the purpose of this study is to investigate some of the theories as to why co authorship has been increasing in the economics profession using data on the publication records of faculty at 129 us colleges and universities that offer doctoral degrees in economics poisson and logit regression models are estimated to explain co authorship results indicate that the likelihood of co authorship is greater for papers that combine quantitative analysis with another field and for papers published in higher quality journals further co authorship appears to differ in the many subfields of economics with the field of economic history and history of thought journal of economic literature jel categories n and b to be the least likely to co author and the fields of financial economics jel category g and agricu

regional trading arrangements natural or supernatural members of the customs union the potential unfavorable effects arise from the introduction of distortions in the relative price between the goods of members and nonmembers in terms of classic customs union theory the trade off is between trade creation and trade diversion the entire exercise assumes that the firstbest solution of worldwide free trade is not attainable for political reasons thus the choice between a status quo of nondiscriminatory most favored nation mfn tariffs and a move to preferential trading arrangements pta s is an exercise in the theory of the second best this paper summarizes recent research by the authors we make an evaluation of the

willful blindness the inefficient reward structure in academic research this article examines how economics departments judge research articles and assign credit to authors it begins with a demonstration that only strictly prorated author credit induces researchers to choose e cient sized teams nevertheless survey evidence reveals that most economics departments only partially prorate authorship credit implying excessive coauthorship indeed a half century increase in coauthorship may be better explained by incomplete proration than by any increased specialization among authors a possible explanation for the reliance on incomplete proration is the self interest of economists who are more likely to engage coauthorship full professors the self interest of senior faculty may also explain the relatively small role given to citations in senior promotions a rational response by economists to the under proration of author credit is to engage in false authorship although false authorship is of dubious ethical status it may have the perverse impact of improving the e ciency of team production grossly excessive coauthorship where little attention is paid to most authors listed on a paper as found in some other academic disciplines may be the path down which economics is headed if the reward structure is not altered jel a14 o30 i23

club networks with multiple memberships and noncooperative stability modeling club structures as bipartite directed networks we formulate the problem of club formation with multiple memberships as a noncooperative game of network formation and identify conditions on network formation rules and players network payoffs sufficient to guarantee that the game has a potential function our sufficient conditions require that each player choose freely and unilaterally those clubs he joins and also his activities within those clubs subject to feasibility constraints we refer to our conditions on rules as noncooperative free mobility we also require that players payoffs be additively separable in player specific payoffs and externalities and that payoff externalities a function of club membership club activities and crowding be identical across players externality homogeneity we then show that under these conditions the noncooperative game of club network formation with multiple memberships is a potential game over directed club networks and we discuss the implications of this result

strategic entry and market leadership in a two player real options game abstract we analyse the entry decisions of competing firms in a two player stochastic real option game when rivals earn different but correlated uncertain profitabilities from operating in the presence of entry costs decision thresholds exhibit hysteresis the range of which is decreasing in the correlation between competing firms a measure of the expected time of each firm being active in the market and the probability of both rivals entering within a finite time are explicitly calculated the former latter is found to decrease increase with the volatility of relative firm profitabilities implying that market leadership is shorter lived the more uncertain the industry environment in an application of the model to the aircraft industry we find that boeing s optimal response to airbus launch of the a380 super carrier is to accommodate entry and supplement its current product line as opposed to the riskier alternative of committing to the development of a corresponding super jumbo