a model of temporary search market equilibrium abstract in the literature on search markets agents know the distribution of prices or learn about it through short run bayesian updating even though the first assumption is unrealistic and the empirical evidence emphasizes learning in the intermediate and long runs in this paper a new search markets theory is developed where agents have beliefs about the distribution of prices based on finitely many of its moments and past market experiences the main results are the existence of a hicks grandmont temporary equilibrium that the equilibrium correspondence has a closed graph and sufficient conditions for price dispersion a simple example illustrates the main ideas journal of economic literature classification numbers d83 l13

the contingent governance of teams analysis of institutional complementarity the first purpose of this paper is to design a model of governance structure called the contingent governance which can control the free riding problem in teams in the second best manner the second is to show by a new method of comparative static analysis that the effectiveness of the contingent governance may be enhanced by complementary institutional arrangements of the imperfect labor market and bank centered financial system the paper discusses the implications of such institutional complementarity for the dynamic change of the japanese main bank system and financial system design of transitional economies copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

eaere award for the best paper published in environmental and resource economics during 2019 we present details of the eaere award for the best paper published in environmental and resource economics during 2019 together with those highly commended papers published during this period

has discretionary learning declined during the lisbon agenda a cross sectional and longitudinal study of work organization in european nations this article explores changes in the organization of work in european nations over 2000 2010 results show a decline in the discretionary learning dl periods of economic expansion tend to be dl enhancing while periods of economic stagnation tend to reinforce the use of more hierarchical forms of work organization more generally the results show that cross country comparisons do not provide a sound basis for drawing conclusions about how the evolution of national labor market policies impact on changes in work organization over time within nations

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

mixed equilibria are unstable in games of strategic complements in games with strict strategic complementarities properly mixed nash equilibria equilibria that are not in pure strategies are unstable for a broad class of learning dynamics

the induced innovation hypothesis and energy saving technological change we develop a methodology for testing hicks s induced innovation hypothesis by estimating a product characteristics model of energy using consumer durables augmenting the hypothesis to allow for the ine uence of government regulations for the products we explored the evidence suggests that i the rate of overall innovation was independent of energy prices and regulations ii the direction of innovation was responsive to energy price changes for some products but not for others iii energy price changes induced changes in the subset of technically feasible models that were offered for sale iv this responsiveness increased substantially during the period after energy efficiency product labeling was required and v nonetheless a sizable portion of efficiency improvements were autonomous

using price distributions to estimate search costs we show how the equilibrium restrictions implied by standard search models can be used to estimate search cost distributions using price data alone we consider both sequential and nonsequential search strategies and develop estimation methodologies that exploit equilibrium restrictions to recover estimates of search cost heterogeneity that are theoretically consistent with the search models we illustrate the method using online prices for several economics and statistics textbooks

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

wage and price controls in the equilibrium sequential search model abstract in this paper we study the effects of wage and price controls on employment output and welfare in a simplified version of the benabou j econom theory 60 1993 140 equilibrium sequential search model with bilateral heterogeneity we show that a price ceiling increases output but the change in welfare depends on three effects the reduction in aggregate search costs the increase in surplus due to increased output and the transfer of production to the least efficient firm the model is formally identical to a standard equilibrium search model of the labor market so analogous results hold for the minimum wage

learning in an equilibrium search model this paper explores the role of learning in an equilibrium search model with asymmetric information firms with identical but privately observed marginal cost sell a homogeneous good to heterogeneously informed consumers a reservation price equilibrium exists if the uninformed consumers search cost is sufficiently large in this equilibrium the amount of price dispersion is inversely related to the realization of marginal cost also the average price level is less responsive to cost changes than when cost is observable finally uncertainty about firms marginal cost increases the expected price level copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

varieties in state capitalism outward fdi strategies of central and local state owned enterprises from emerging economy countries institutional diversity characterizing state owned enterprises soes from emerging economies holds critical but under examined implications for their internationalization activities different types of soes can exhibit distinct motivations strategic resources and adaptive capabilities for penetrating foreign markets to understand how such idiosyncratic differences emerge we conceptualize the heterogeneity of soes as an outcome of multiple institutional reform processes administrative and fiscal decentralization industrial restructuring and market liberalization which create diversity between soes affiliated with central and local levels of government building on the idea of institutions as configurations we elucidate how such reforms reconfigure soes constellation of resources capabilities and priorities which shape the parameters of their ability to negotiate for home and host country institutional legitimacy specifically we propose that the restructuring of central soes into national champions exposes them to stronger institutional pressures from home and host country governments while local soes which have fewer obligations to serve national strategic prerogatives display greater managerial autonomy and market orientation but lower levels of monopolistic behavior we discuss how such contrasting attributes contribute to variations in soes international business diversification patterns foreign subsidiary establishment and ownership modes and overseas location preferences recognition of soes organizational diversity holds important implications for theories on state owned multinationals

macro financial linkages the role of the institutional framework abstract in this paper we assess the quantitative impact of various financial shocks on the real activity and explicitly address the issue of heterogeneity in the macro financial linkages for that purpose we use var models as well as the local projection method for 18 oecd countries based on quarterly data between 1995 and 2014 we take into account three main dimensions of the institutional framework likely to explain the observed cross country heterogeneity in the propagation of financial shocks the product market regulation the employment protection and the financial structure our main findings indicate that financial shocks have a stronger impact in countries characterized by a higher competition friendly regulatory stance a stronger employment protection and a more market oriented financial structure we also show that the varieties of capitalism described by the particular mix of different institutional arrangements do not play a significant role in shaping the macro financial linkages this result suggests that although considered individually goods labor and financial markets regulations are robustly linked to macroeconomic fluctuations there is no prima facie evidence for superior performance of any given mix of institutional arrangements observed in oecd countries

failure is an option institutional change entrepreneurial risk and new firm growth does an institutional change that lowers failure barriers improve new firm growth we take advantage of a quasi natural experiment in japan that drastically reduced the stringency of bankruptcy regulations to examine this question using longitudinal data over a 10 year period we find that bankruptcy reform increases the rates of bankruptcy and founding and more importantly the likelihood of high growth ventures by disproportionately encouraging elite individuals i e those with superior human and social capital to start firms in turn these firms are more likely than others to achieve high growth broadly put we contribute to research at the nexus of institutional theory and entrepreneurship by emphasizing the connectedness of barriers to failure venture growth and elite entrepreneurs we also highlight how institutional change that eases bankruptcy change can foster a regenerative cycle of failure founding and growth by attracting more capable entrepreneurs overall we conclude that lowerin

setting international standards technological rationality or primacy of power standards have become one of the most important nontariff barriers to trade especially national product standards that specify design or performance characteristics of manufactured goods divergent national standards often inhibit trade whereas regional and international standards increasingly serve as instruments of trade liberalization consequently the setting of international standards seemingly technical and apolitical is rapidly becoming an issue of economic and political salience but who sets international standards who wins who loses this article offers a fresh analytical approach to the study of international standards which the authors call the institutional complementarities approach it builds on insights from realism and the battle of the sexes coordination game but emphasizes complementarities of historically conditioned standardization systems at the national level with the institutional structure of standardization at the international level it posits that after controlling for other factors that influence involvement in international standardization differences in institutional complementarities play a critical though largely accidental role in placing firms from different countries or regions in a first or second mover position when standardization becomes global the authors illustrate the insightfulness of this approach through statistical analyses of the first scientific set of data on standards use and standardization collected by the authors through an international online survey

coordination and motivation in flat hierarchies the impact of the adjudication culture this paper considers a variation of the partnership game with imperfect public information in which teams are semi autonomous the only hierarchical intervention in teamwork is when a superior is called in by a team member to adjudicate alleged cases of free riding or unjustified lateral punishment flat hierarchy according to publicly known adjudicative rules adjudication culture using for statistical inference a publicly known organizational norm for teamwork cooperation it is shown that it is advantageous to set a non elitist organizational teamwork norm furthermore fairness in adjudication is valuable for economic reasons alone

oligopolistic pricing with heterogeneous consumer search abstract a finite number of identical stores sell a homogeneous good to consumers with heterogeneous search costs who search sequentially with perfect recall and without replacement consumers search rules are optimal with respect to the stores pricing strategies and consumers must visit a store to obtain information about its actual price a symmetric nash equilibrium sne always exists the model exhibits a variety of equilibrium behaviors between monopoly pricing and marginal cost pricing the competitiveness of a market depends crucially on the shape of the search cost distribution moreso than on the number of competing firms

nonstandard foundations of equilibrium search models abstract we develop an equilibrium sequential search model which includes most of the literature as special cases in particular the model can accommodate heterogeneity in buyers search costs and demand functions and firms cost functions with general demand and cost functions we identify conditions which ensure existence of equilibrium in pure strategies utilizing recent progress in the theory of large games by khan and sun these conditions elucidate the essential structure of equilibrium search models although we focus on sequential search our methodology can be used for other classes of equilibrium search models as well

socio productive models in france an empirical dynamic overview 1992 2004 the authors assess the evolution of french workplaces over the periods 1992 1993 1998 1999 and 2004 2005 within the framework of socio productive organizational models using french employment re

equilibrium price distributions equilibrium price distributions for a homogeneous product consistent with individual incentives are investigated they arise in informationally imperfect markets in which the only primitive datum is the distribution of search costs it is shown that single multi and continuous price distributions are all viable long run phenomena depending on the nature of search costs a method for computing equilibrium price distributions is also provided jevons law of one price has long been an accepted dictum in economic theory in a classroom presentation it still serves sometimes implicitly as a major premise in many micro models of market interaction much of the descriptive theory as well as welfare analysis hinges on this assumption yet one s day to day experience reveals that price differentials are a viable phenomenon and that looking for lower prices may very well be a rewarding activity the prospects of eventually hitting a bargain and the resulting price reduction would more than compensate for the cost incurred during the search process moreover the existence of price dispersions appear to be an empirically stable phenomenon snapshots of markets for relatively homogeneous products reveal substantial and recurring price differentials stigler 1961 and pratt wise and zeckhauser 1979 for example report some evidence supporting this claim an important article by stigler 1961 focused economists attention on the crucial role played by the informational structure of markets it gave rise to the study of the

regulation school and environment theoretical proposals and avenues of research abstract the article explores the relevance of a particular approach of the institutionalist movement regulation theory to deal with the relationship between the economy and the environment regulation theory which appeared in france at the end of the 1970s is mainly interested in macroeconomic issues in contrast until now it has tended to neglect environmental questions by taking several key concepts of this theory accumulation regime mode of regulation institutional forms we have sought to assess its significance vis a vis the environmental field more precisely from the perspective of establishing an environmental regulationist theory we propose considering the economic relation to the environment as the articulation of three forms a transhistorical form a general capitalist form and a specific capitalist form the latter being variable in capitalist time and space we give several illustrations of the variability of the relation to the environment depending on the different accumulation regimes and the different modes of regulation two principal avenues of research are proposed historical analyses for given economic areas and comparative analyses relating in particular to different capitalist areas

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

search market equilibrium bilateral heterogeneity and repeat purchases abstract we develop a general model of search market equilibrium with heterogeneous buyers and sellers this framework unifies previous models with one sided heterogeneity and clarifies many of their special properties it easily accounts for price dispersion active search and the matching of buyer and seller types it also extends to repeat purchases once we embed it into a dynamic game with incomplete information we formalize the inferences and strategies underlying equilibria where firms charge constant prices and customers patronize them loyally we establish a general correspondence between such equilibria and single purchase markets journal of economic literature classification numbers d83 l13

induced innovation and energy prices this paper uses u s patent data from 1970 to 1994 to study the impact of energy prices on energy efficient innovations theories of technological change have focused both on demand side factors which spur innovative activity by increasing the value of new innovations and supply side factors such as scientific advancements that make new innovations possible data on demand side factors are easily obtained but data on supply side factors that influence innovation are not readily available this paper uses patent citations as a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge citations to previous patents are used to construct productivity estimates which measure the usefulness of the existing stock of knowledge to inventors in a given energy field for any given year these estimates are then combined with data on demand side factors to estimate a model of induced innovation in energy technologies the results indicate that both energy prices and the supply of knowledge have strongly significant positive effects on innovation the paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of this work for environmental policy

mobility and innovation a cross country comparison in the video games industry open labour markets are often seen as a precondition for innovation particularly for new industries however this view ignores two core findings of the economic systems literature first that mobility patterns are institutional microsystems that need to be complementary to other institutions in the labour market and second that new industries may be characterised by incremental and complex innovation based on these considerations we ask how mobility affects innovation in the video games industry in the us and japan we find that inter firm mobility is beneficial for innovation in the us but has negative effects in japan we further find that inter functional mobility is beneficial for innovation in both countries our analysis is based on career histories from the video games industry in the us and japan we present an empirical study based on the game development of 815 video games and the careers of 28 426 video game developers who were involved in the development of games released between 1999 and 2009

strategic pricing consumer search and the number of firms discover prices there are three distinct price dispersed equilibria characterized by low moderate and high search intensity the effects of an increase in the number of firms on search behaviour expected prices price dispersion and welfare are sensitive i to the equilibrium consumers search intensity and ii to the status quo number of firms for instance when consumers search with low intensity an increase in the number of firms reduces search does not affect expected price leads to greater price dispersion and reduces welfare in contrast when consumers search with high intensity increased competition results in more search and lower prices when the number of competitors in the market is low to begin with but in less search and higher prices when the number of competitors is large duopoly yields identical expected price and price dispersion but higher welfare than an infinite number of firms a question that has received much attention in economic theory is how the number of competitors and market outcomes are related despite the existence of work showing the contrary see e g satterthwaite 1979 rosenthal 1980 the prediction that emerges from a market where firms interact in a cournot fashion has come to dominate economic thought namely that an increase in the number of competitors leads to larger aggregate production lower market price and improved market performance measured in terms of some social welfare criterion ruffin 1971 this paper challenges the generality of this belief by presenting an oligopoly model with consumer search where the equilibrium expected price may be constant increasing or nonmonotonic in the number of firms we present an economy with two types of consumers consumers who search for prices at no cost fully informed and consumers who must pay a fixed search cost for each price quotation they observe less informed 1 all buyers have the same willingness to pay for the good and buy either a single unit or nothing at all on the supply side of the market there are n firms producing a homogeneous good at constant marginal cost we analyse a one shot simultaneous move game firms set prices and consumers decide how many prices to search for at the same moment in time our model is essentially an oligopolistic version of burdett and judd 1983 where some consumers search costlessly in this model consumers search using a fixed sample size search strategy i e they choose the number of prices to observe before receiving any offer nonsequential search is appealing when consumers find it more advantageous to gather price information quickly morgan and manning 1985 this occurs when the search outcome is observed with delay and delay is costly for instance an mba graduate looking for a job 1 the presence in the model of consumers who search costlessly captures the fact that some people have a

credit and efficiency in centralized and decentralized economies we study a credit model where because of adverse selection unprofitable projects may nevertheless be financed indeed they may continue to be financed even when shown to be low quality if sunk costs have already been incurred we show that credit decentralization offers a way for creditors to commit not to refinance such projects thereby discouraging entrepreneurs from undertaking them initially thus decentralization provides financial discipline nevertheless we argue that it puts too high a premium on short term returns the model seems pertinent to two issues soft budget constraint problems in centralized economies and differences between anglo saxon and german japanese financing practices

when order affects performance culture behavioral spillovers and institutional path dependence evidence suggests that the cultural context influences the performance of laws policies and political institutions descriptive accounts reveal that outcomes and behaviors often depend on the array of historical institutions this article presents a multi institutional framework that can account for those findings through path dependent behavioral spillovers individuals learn equilibrium behaviors when interacting in a new institutional setting initially some individuals choose behaviors that align with their behaviors in similar extant institutions creating a cultural context that can lead to inefficient outcomes the article shows how avoiding path dependence requires sequencing or designing institutions to maintain behavioral diversity optimal sequencing thus requires positioning institutions with clear incentives early in the sequence as well as avoiding strong punishments that can stifle attempts to break established behavioral patterns

truly costly sequential search and oligopolistic pricing we modify the paper of stahl 1989 stahl d o 1989 oligopolistic pricing with sequential consumer search american economic review 79 700 12 by relaxing the assumption that consumers obtain the first price quotation for free when all price quotations are costly to obtain the unique symmetric equilibrium need not involve full consumer participation the region of parameters for which non shoppers do not fully participate in the market becomes larger as the number of shoppers decreases and or the number of firms increases the comparative statics properties of this new type of equilibrium are interesting in particular expected price increases as search cost decreases and is constant in the number of shoppers and in the number of firms welfare falls as firms enter the market we show that monopoly pricing never obtains with truly costly search d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

product differentiation search costs and competition in the mutual fund industry a case study of s p 500 index funds we investigate the role that non portfolio fund differentiation and information search frictions play in creating two salient features of the mutual fund industry the large number of funds and the sizeable dispersion in fund fees in a case study we find that despite the financial homogeneity of s p 500 index funds this sector exhibits the fund proliferation and fee dispersion observed in the broader industry we show how extra portfolio mechanisms explain these features these mechanisms also suggest an explanation for the puzzling late 1990s shift in sector assets to more expensive and often newly entered funds an influx of highinformation cost novice investors

determinants of environmental innovation in us manufacturing industries abstract this paper provides new evidence on the determinants of environmental innovation we employ panel data models to study how environmental innovation by us manufacturing industries responded to changes in pollution abatement expenditures and regulatory enforcement during the period 1983 through 1992 we find that 1 environmental innovation as measured by the number of successful environmental patent applications granted to the industry responded to increases in pollution abatement expenditures however 2 increased monitoring and enforcement activities related to existing regulations did not provide any additional incentive to innovate we also find some empirical evidence that environmental innovation is more likely to occur in industries that are internationally competitive

environmental policy and induced technological change evidence from automobile fuel economy regulations this paper investigates whether environmental or energy efficiency regulations induce innovations in relevant technologies through focusing on the tightening of japanese fuel economy regulations in the 1990s and the early 2000s unlike previous studies that analyze patent data i use vehicle level specification data for 1985 2004 to estimate whether regulatory pressure accelerated technological progress in fuel efficiency i compare japanese automakers with selected american and european automakers in a difference in differences framework the estimation results provide strong evidence for induced technological change conditional on other vehicle attributes and the production cost the regulatory tightening induced at least a 3 5 improvement in the average japanese vehicle s fuel economy relative to a counterfactual case with no regulatory change an effect which would have taken at least 4 7 years to be realized with no pressure from fuel economy regulations or fuel prices

structural reforms in europe and the in coherence of institutions the aim of this paper is to analyse the consequences of some structural reforms on the institutional coherence of oecd countries particularly in continental europe and on their economic performance particularly as regards employment because institutions in developed political economies are interrelated through a complex network of complementarities institutional change has consequences beyond the area concerned in a reform this also implies that there are complementarity effects in reforms themselves a challenge of reform programmes is therefore to achieve a new type of complementarity between reformed institutions the paper presents empirical evidence questioning the compatibility of the ongoing structural reforms in product and labour markets with the existing institutional structures in some oecd countries the coherence of the flexicurity strategy i e a combination of labour market flexibility and a generous welfare state is also questioned from the point of view of both economic efficiency and political economy

rationalizability learning and equilibrium in games with strategic complementarities we study a rich class of noncooperative games that includes models of oligopoly competition macroeconomic coordination failures arms races bank runs technology adoption and diffusion r d competition pretrial bargaining coordination in teams and many others for all these games the sets of pure strategy nash equilibria correlated equilibria and rationalizable strategies have identical bounds also for a class of models of dynamic adaptive choice behavior that encompasses both best response dynamics and bayesian learning the players choices lie eventually within the same bounds these bounds are shown to vary monotonically with certain exogenous parameters we study the class of noncooperative supermodular games introduced by topkis 1979 and further analyzed by vives 1985 1989 who also pointed out the importance of these games in industrial economics supermodular games are games in which each player s strategy set is partially ordered the marginal returns to increasing one s strategy rise with increases in the competitors strategies so that the game exhibits strategic complementarity 2 and if a player s strategies are multidimensional marginal returns to any one com ponent of the player s strategy rise with increases in the other components this class turns out to encompass many of the most important economic applications of noncooperative game theory in macroeconomics diamond s 1982 search model and bryant s 1983 1984 rational expectations models can be represented as supermodular games in each of these models more activity by some members of the economy raises the returns to increased levels of activity by others in oligopoly theory some models of bertrand oligopoly with differentiated products qualify as supermodu lar games in these games when a firm s competitors raise their prices the marginal profitability of the firm s own price increase rises a similar structure is present in games of new technology adoption such as those of dybvig and spatt 1983 farrell and saloner 1986 and katz and shapiro 1986 when more users hook into a communication system or more manufacturers adopt an interface standard the marginal return to others of doing the same often rises similarly in some specifications of the bank runs model introduced by diamond and dybvig 1983 when more depositors withdraw their funds from a bank it is more worthwhile for other depositors to do the same in the warrant exercise

strategic complementarities and search market equilibrium abstract in this paper we apply supermodular game theory to the equilibrium search literature with sequential search we identify necessary and sufficient conditions for the pricing game to exhibit strategic complementarities and prove existence of equilibrium we then show that price dispersion is inherently incompatible with strategic complementarities in the sense that the diamond paradox obtains when firms are identical and is robust within the class of search cost densities that are small near zero and support strategic complementarities we also show that a major criticism of the literature that agents act as if they know the distribution of prices can be justified in the sense of convergent best response dynamics

innovation and the international diffusion of environmentally responsive technology abstract new evidence is presented on environmental innovation and diffusion over the 1970s and 1980s at a global level a substantial amount of innovations occurred in the united states japan and germany the share of environmental patents in all patents varied between 0 6 and 3 and as such was higher than the corresponding share of pollution abatement expenditure in gdp japanese environmental innovation rates were consistently high certain plausible connections between environmental regulation and innovation also emerge across these three countries and over time innovation responded to pollution abatement expenditure an indicator of the severity of environmental regulations environmental patenting rates in developing countries were also high reaching 2 in many years in brazil developing country innovators obtained a non trivial number of patents most of which appear geared towards adapting imported technologies to local conditions however domestic innovation was only one path to new technologies imports of disembodied environmental technologies foreign patents registered in developing countries were substantial foreign patents were typically important or generic patents evidence also suggests that such patents protected intellectual property in equipment exported developing countries especially in east asia often chose to obtain technologies embodied in pollution abatement equipment

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

institutions economics and the development quest institutions crucial for the analysis of how agents deal with uncertainty have been gaining increasing relevance on the economic research agenda in this paper we analyze the institutional literature aiming to explain why this perspective obtains better results than others in development economics in particular we stress the relevance of new institutional economics as an adequate framework for a broad understanding of development issues

search with learning from prices does increased inflationary uncertainty lead to higher markups aggregate cost uncertainty arising from real shocks or unanticipated inflation reduces the informativeness of prices by scrambling relative and aggregate variations but when agents can acquire additional information such increased noise may in fact lead them to become better informed and price competition will intensify we examine these issues in a model of search with learning where consumers search optimally from an unknown price distribution while firms price optimally given consumers search rules we show that the decisive factor in whether inflation variability increases or reduces the incentive to search and thereby market efficiency is the size of informational costs

institutional polycentrism entrepreneurs social networks and new venture growth what is the interrelationship among formal institutions social networks and new venture growth drawing on the theory of institutional polycentrism and social network theory we examine this question using data on 637 entrepreneurs from four different countries we find the confluence of weak and inefficient formal institutions to be associated with a larger number of structural holes in entrepreneurial social networks while the effect of this institutional order on the revenue growth of new ventures is negative a network s structural holes have a positive effect on revenue growth furthermore the positive effect of structural holes on revenue growth is stronger in an environment with a more adverse institutional order i e weaker and more inefficient institutions the contributions and implications of these findings are discussed abstract from author