information transmission cournot and bertrand equilibria we examine how incentives for two duopolists to honestly share information change depending upon the nature of competition cournot or bertrand and the nature of the information structure while in earlier papers uncertainty is about an unknown common demand intercept in the present paper uncertainty is about unknown private costs the different information structure reverses the incentives to share information while with unknown common demand sharing is a dominant strategy with bertrand competition and concealing is a dominant strategy with cournot competition with unknown private costs sharing is a dominant strategy with cournot competition and concealing is a dominant strategy with bertrand competition

the generalized multinomial logit model accounting for scale and coefficient heterogeneity the mixed or heterogeneous multinomial logit mixl model has become popular in a number of fields especially marketing health economics and industrial organization in most applications of the model the vector of consumer utility weights on product attributes is assumed to have a multivariate normal mvn distribution in the population thus some consumers care more about some attributes than others and the iia property of multinomial logit mnl is avoided i e segments of consumers will tend to switch among the subset of brands that possess their most valued attributes the mixl model is also appealing because it is relatively easy to estimate recently however some researchers have argued that the mvn is a poor choice for modelling taste heterogeneity they argue that much of the heterogeneity in attribute weights is accounted for by a pure scale effect i e across consumers all attribute weights are scaled up or down in tandem this implies that choice behaviour is simply more random for some consumers than others i e holding attribute coefficients fixed the scale of their error term is greater this leads to a scale heterogeneity mnl model s mnl here we develop a generalized multinomial logit model g mnl that nests s mnl and mixl by estimating the s mnl mixl and g mnl models on 10 data sets we provide evidence on their relative performance we find that models that account for scale heterogeneity i e g mnl or s mnl are preferred to mixl by the bayes and consistent akaike information criteria in all 10 data sets accounting for scale heterogeneity enables one to account for extreme consumers who exhibit nearly lexicographic preferences as well as consumers who exhibit very random behaviour in a sense we formalize below

household coping in war and peacetime cattle sales in rwanda 1991 2001 abstract the economic literature has given due attention to household coping strategies in peacetime in contrast little is known about such strategies in wartime this paper studies the use of cattle as a buffer stock by rwandan households during 1991 2001 a period characterized by civil war and genocide it is found that the probability of selling cattle increases upon the occurrence of both peacetime and wartime covariant adverse income shocks the peacetime cattle sales are largely explained by shifts in the household asset portfolio in contrast in 1994 the year of the genocide almost half of the cattle sales were motivated by the need to buy food however we argue that the effectiveness of this coping strategy was severely reduced due to the wartime conditions first during the year of ethnic violence cattle prices plummeted to less than half of their pre genocide value second we find that households most targeted in the violence did not sell cattle we discuss several explanations for this latter finding

ordering effects and choice set awareness in repeat response stated preference studies we present an experiment designed to investigate the presence and nature of ordering effects within repeat response stated preference sp studies our experiment takes the form of a large sample full factorial discrete choice sp exercise investigating preferences for tap water quality improvements our study simultaneously investigates a variety of different forms of position dependent and precedent dependent ordering effect in preferences for attributes and options and in response randomness we also examine whether advanced disclosure of the choice tasks impacts on the probability of exhibiting ordering effects of those different types we analyze our data both non parametrically and parametrically and find robust evidence for ordering effects we also find that the patterns of order effect in respondents preferences are significantly changed but not eradicated by the advanced disclosure of choice tasks a finding that offers insights into the choice behaviors underpinning order effects

agricultural production amid conflict separating the effects of conflict into shocks and uncertainty abstract this paper examines the effect of conflict on agricultural production of small farmers first an inter temporal model of agricultural production is developed in which the impact of conflict is transmitted through violent shocks and uncertainty brought about by conflict we test the model using a unique household survey applied to 4800 households in four micro regions of colombia our findings suggest households learn to live amid conflict albeit at a lower income trajectory when presence of non state armed actors prolongs farmers shift to activities with short term yields and lower profitability from activities that require high investments if violence intensifies in regions with presence of non state armed actors farmers concentrate on subsistence activities

platform competition in two sided markets many if not most markets with network externalities are two sided to succeed platforms in industries such as software portals and media payment systems and the internet must get both sides of the market on board accordingly platforms devote much attention to their business model that is to how they court each side while making money overall this paper builds a model of platform competition with two sided markets it unveils the determinants of price allocation and end user surplus for different governance structures profit maximizing platforms and not for profit joint undertakings and compares the outcomes with those under an integrated monopolist and a ramsey planner jel l5 l82 l86 l96

the cost of fear the welfare effect of the risk of violence in northern uganda although the effects of insecurity are believed to be important these have never been directly measured previous estimates of the costs of conflict have only captured the joint effect of violence and insecurity the distinction is important for understanding the origins of the costs and for policy design spatially disaggregated measures of insecurity are created based on the spatial temporal variation in the placement of violence these are used to generate the first estimates of the relative causal contributions of the risk and experience of violence the article also provides the first micro data based counterpart to the cross country literature on the costs of conflict

the effects of information transparency on suppliers manufacturers and consumers in online markets this paper looks into the effects of information transparency on market participants in an online trading environment we study these effects in business to business electronic markets with firms competing in both upstream and downstream industries the prior literature generally assumes that either the downstream firm buyer or the upstream firm seller is a monopoly it is not clear whether information transparency would still create value if both buyers and sellers face oligopolistic competition where the benefits of information transparency could be competed away to answer this question we first develop a simple two echelon e market model and then extend the model to more general settings we find that information transparency can create value for the overall e market yet it affects buyers and sellers very differently one side will be hurt depending on the competition mode cournot or bertrand in the downstream this suggests that a manufacturer owned a supplier owned and a neutral e market will have different preferences for information transparency finally we find that information transparency can hurt consumers when the downstream industry engages in bertrand competition this is a surprising result given the expectation that online markets create substantial value for consumers

estimating the peace dividend the impact of violence on house prices in northern ireland this article exploits data on the pattern of violence across regions and over time to estimate the impact of the peace process in northern ireland on house prices after establishing a negative correlation between killings and house prices we estimate the parameters of a markov switching model with conflict and peace as latent states we use the model to estimate the size of the peace dividend as captured in house price changes jel d74 r23 r31 conflict in ireland has a long history even after the republic of ireland was created as an independent state in 1920 the status of the mainly protestant north remained contested from the late 1960s a violent conflict flared up which claimed around 3 500 lives only more than two decades later from 1993 onwards emerged a peace process which while initially fragile culminated in a cessation of violence and a return to devolved government by 2007 the conflict was a major source of social and economic dislocation but as peace took hold this has begun to be repaired this paper assesses the impact of peace by using variation in violence within northern ireland to study one important economic aspect of the peace process and the dividend that it brought to residents of northern ireland the impact on house prices houses are assets whose prices reflect the present and future expected attrac tiveness of living in an area even during the height of the conflict in northern ireland violence was not uniform for example belfast the capital city of the province of northern ireland was particularly hard hit looking for economic consequences of the peace process we would therefore expect benefits to be concentrated among areas where violence was most prevalent we exploit within region variability in violence and house prices over time having such variation is rare in studies of the economic consequences of conflict our specific measure of violence is conflict related deaths these have been well documented by sutton 1994 and the conflict archive on the

choice certainty and consistency in repeated choice experiments the main objective of this study is to examine how repeated choice affects preference learning in stated preference experiments we test different hypotheses related to preference learning by analyzing response patterns and asking respondents in a choice experiment to report their experienced certainty when going through the choice tasks in a split sample test we show that follow up choice certainty questions are procedural invariant the self reported certainty results indicate that learning occurs but econometric testing procedures do not identify any significant impact of learning effects on parameter estimates or variance across choice tasks additional tests of choice consistency suggest that preferences in the choice experiment are stable and coherent

electronic b2b marketplaces with different ownership structures this paper analyzes electronic marketplaces with different ownership structures biased marketplaces and neutral marketplaces biased marketplaces can be either buyer owned or supplier owned whereas neutral marketplaces are owned by independent third parties we develop a single period model with fulfilled expectations equilibrium the buyers experience positive network effects that are a function of the number of suppliers and the suppliers receive similar positive network effects depending on the number of buyers we develop a general model with atomistic buyers and suppliers we find that biased marketplaces set prices to induce greater participation demand from both buyers and suppliers compared to a neutral marketplace this counterintuitive result can be understood in the context of the positive cross network effects experienced by buyers and suppliers and the added benefit to the owner of a biased marketplace from participating in the marketplace biased marketplaces also provide greater social welfare compared to neutral marketplaces

utility in willingness to pay space a tool to address confounding random scale effects in destination choice to the alps we compare two approaches for estimating the distribution of consumers willingness to pay wtp in discrete choice models the usual procedure is to estimate the distribution of the utility coefficients and then derive the distribution of wtp which is the ratio of coefficients the alternative is to estimate the distribution of wtp directly we apply both approaches to data on site choice in the alps we find that the alternative approach fits the data better reduces the incidence of exceedingly large estimated wtp values and provides the analyst with greater control in specifying and testing the distribution of wtp copyright 2008 oxford university press

business to business electronic commerce just as the industrial revolution mechanized the manufacturing functions of firms the information revolution is automating their merchant functions four types of potential productivity gains are expected from business to business b2b electronic commerce cost efficiencies from automation of transactions potential advantages of new market intermediaries consolidation of demand and supply through organized exchanges and changes in the extent of vertical integration of firms the article examines the characteristics of b2b online intermediaries including categories of goods traded market mechanisms employed and ownership arrangements and considers the market structure of b2b e commerce

effects of conflict on agriculture evidence from the boko haram insurgency abstract we investigate the effects of conflict on agriculture using the boko haram insurgency as a case study we identify the output input infrastructure and human capital effects as direct effects and the loss of talent and other environmental factors as indirect effects identified market effects include effects on product and input prices and increased risk premiums by combining a nationally representative panel dataset on nigerian agriculture with armed conflict data we find that the increased intensity of boko haram attacks significantly reduces total output and productivity but not land use and reduces the outputs of specific staple crops such as sorghum cassava soya and yam conflict is also found to reduce the hours of hired labor for men and women but does not affect the use of family labor agricultural wages are however significantly affected because it reveals if why and how conflict affects agriculture this study has important implications for post crisis recovery and agricultural development

do hypothetical and actual marginal willingness to pay differ in choice experiments application to the valuation of the environment abstract in this paper we test the validity of choice experiments with donations for environmental projects in particular we test whether or not there are differences in preferences between a hypothetical and an actual choice experiment our experiments indicate no differences in addition internal tests of validity indicate transitive and stable preferences in both experiments although there are some indications of possible learning effects during the experiment

new firm survival new results using a hazard function a limitation of audretsch s 1991 study of new firm survival was the level of aggregation to industries this precluded linking establishment specific characteristics such as organizational structure and size to post entry performance the purpose of this paper is to relate the post entry performance of individual establishments not only to their technological and market structure environments but also to establishment specific characteristics we do this by estimating a hazard duration function for more than 12 000 individual establishments in u s manufacturing started in 1976 by tracking their subsequent performance over a ten year period we conclude that establishment specific characteristics which audretsch was not able to capture in his earlier study play an important role in shaping the exposure to risk confronting new establishments copyright 1995 by mit press

optimal targeting under budget constraints in a humanitarian context the combination of conflict food insecurity and displacement generates competing claims for financial resources that stretch the donors ability to provide funding and the humanitarian organizations capacity to provide social assistance the paper uses receiver operating characteristic curves and related indexes to determine the optimal targeting strategy of a food voucher program for refugees the estimations focus on the 2014 food vouchers administered by the world food programme to syrian refugees in jordan the analysis uses data collected by the united nations high commissioner for refugees based on a poverty model receiver operating characteristic curves are used to optimize coverage and leakage rates under budget constraints the paper shows how policy makers can use these instruments to fine tune targeting using coverage rates budgets or poverty lines as guiding principles to increase the overall efficiency of a program as humanitarian organizations operate under increasing budget constraints and increasing demands for efficiency the proposed approach addresses both concerns

starting point bias in dichotomous choice valuation with follow up questioning abstract follow up questions are frequently used to improve the efficiency of dichotomous choice contingent valuation questionnaires however a number of authors e g 12 16 have noted a significant difference between the wtp distributions implied by initial and follow up question responses this paper investigates starting point bias as one explanation for the phenomenon we develop a model of starting point bias in the context of dichotomous choice questioning with follow up using a monte carlo simulation to illustrate the potential bias imparted to wtp estimates an application is provided based on data from a cv study in northcentral iowa

information transparency of business to business electronic markets a game theoretic analysis the abundance of transaction data available on the internet tends to make information more transparent in electronic marketplaces in such a transparent environment it becomes easier for suppliers to obtain information that may allow them to infer their rivals costs is this good news or bad news in this study we focus on theinformational effects of business to business b2b exchanges and explore firms incentives to join a b2b exchange that provides an online platform for information transmission we then study the equilibria by developing a game theoretic model under asymmetric information we examine whether the incentives to join a b2b exchange would be different under different competition modes quantity and price different information structures and by varying the nature of the products substitutes and complements our results challenge the information transparency hypothesis i e open sharing of information in electronic markets is beneficial to all participating firms in contrast to the popular belief we show that information transparency could be a double edged sword the individual rationality of participation in the online exchange reflects the tradeoff between information transparency and data confidentiality this may have important implications for the microstructure design e g data access rules of b2b electronic marketplaces

forced displacement and technology adoption an empirical analysis based on agricultural households in bosnia and herzegovina we use the bosnian living standards measurement study lsms survey to show that conflict induced displacement of agricultural households dramatically affects the adoption of new technologies in agriculture we exploit the heterogeneity in the level of violence in the pre war location to account for selection bias this natural experiment seems to be a source of exogenous variation in our case because violence aims at ethnic cleansing without economic consideration we find that the displaced are less likely than stayers to adopt fertiliser and pesticide

displacement due to violence in colombia a household level analysis abstract civil wars and ethnic conflicts have resulted in an estimated number of approximately 35 million refugees and internally displaced persons worldwide understanding the determinants of forced migration is an important prerequisite for the definition of appropriate policies of prevention assistance and relocation we develop a conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of displacement decisions at the household level while similarities to conventional migration theories exist there are also important differences implied by the presence of violent conflict for example risk aversion and lack of information may hamper conventional migration but enhance displacement factors such as landholdings and social capital at the place of origin may not only reduce displacement in the conventional sense of raising opportunity costs but may also spur displacement indirectly by increasing the household s likelihood of becoming the victim of direct threats for the case of colombia we conduct an econom

dynamic learning and context dependence in sequential attribute based stated preference valuation questions a hybrid stated preference model is presented that combines the referendum contingent valuation response format with an experimentally designed set of attributes a sequence of valuation questions is asked to a random sample in a mailout mail back format econometric analysis shows greater discrimination between alternatives in the final choice in the sequence and the vector of preference parameters shifts lead and lag choice sets have a structural influence on current choices and unobserved factors induce positive correlation across the responses these results indicate that people learn about their preferences for attributebased environmental goods by comparing attribute levels across choice sets

learning design contingent valuation ldcv noaa guidelines preference learning and coherent arbitrariness we extend the contingent valuation cv method to test three differing conceptions of individuals preferences as either i a priori well formed or readily divined and revealed through a single dichotomous choice question as per the noaa cv guidelines k arrow r solow p r portney e e leamer r radner h schuman report of the noaa panel on contingent valuation fed reg 58 1993 4601 4614 ii learned or discovered through a process of repetition and experience j a list does market experience eliminate market anomalies q j econ 2003 41 72 c r plott rational individual behaviour in markets and social choice processes the discovered preference hypothesis in k arrow e colombatto m perleman c schmidt eds rational foundations of economic behaviour macmillan london st martin s new york 1996 pp 225 250 iii internally coherent but strongly influenced by some initial arbitrary anchor d ariely g loewenstein d prelec coherent arbitrariness stable demand curves without stable preferences q j econ 118 1 2003 73 105 findings reject both the first and last of these conceptions in favour of a model in which preferences converge towards standard expectations through a process of repetition and learning in doing so we show that such a learning design cv method overturns the stylised facts of bias and anchoring within the double bound dichotomous choice elicitation format

analyzing online b2b exchange markets asymmetric cost and incomplete information this research applies the discriminating auction to analyze the online b2b exchange market in which a single buyer requests multiple items and several suppliers having equal capacity and asymmetric cost submit bids to compete for buyer demand in the present model we examine the impact of asymmetric cost and incomplete information on the participants in the market given the complete cost information each supplier randomizes its price and the lower bound of the price range is determined by the highest marginal cost in addition the supplier with a lower marginal cost has a larger considered pricing space but ultimately has a smaller equilibrium one than others with higher marginal costs when each supplier s marginal cost is private information the lowest possible price is determined by the number of suppliers and the buyer s reservation price comparing these two market settings we find whether it is beneficial to buyers or suppliers depends on the scale of the bid process and the highest marginal cost when the number of suppliers and the difference between the highest marginal cost and the buyer s reservation price are sufficiently large each supplier can gain a higher profit if the marginal costs are private information on the contrary when the highest marginal cost approaches the buyer s reservation price complete cost information benefits the suppliers

position dependent order effects on the prediction of consumer preferences in repeated choice experiments abstractusing stated choice data collected by experimental design with repeated choice tasks this study developed an approach to quantify the position dependent order effects on the prediction of

monotone comparative statics under uncertainty this paper analyzes monotone comparative statics predictions in several classes of stochastic optimization problems the main results characterize necessary and sufficient conditions for comparative statics predictions to hold based on properties of primitive functions that is utility functions and probability distributions the results apply when the primitives satisfy one of the following two properties i a single crossing property which arises in applications such as portfolio investment problems and auctions or ii log supermodularity which arises in the analysis of demand functions affiliated random variables stochastic orders and orders over risk aversion

electronic data interchange competitive externalities and strategic implementation policies electronic data interchange edi is an emerging type of standardized inter organizational information system we analyze the impact of edi on the upstream suppliers competitive position in a simple two level hierarchical market structure where the buyer faces a linear demand curve and the competing heterogeneous suppliers have an upward sloping marginal cost function we show that a suppliers adoption of edi can generate positive externalities for the buyer and negative or competitive externalities for other suppliers as a result the buyer provides a price premium to those suppliers who adopt edi and increases their sales volume and market share moreover when the benefits that the buyer can derive from implementing edi are substantial and the suppliers edi adoption costs are high it may be in the buyer s best interest to subsidize the suppliers so as to encourage them to adopt edi instead of mandating them to do so regardless of whether the buyer employs a mandatory or a subsidizing policy the buyer and the end consumers may be the only ones who gain from this new technology consequently a partial adoption by the supplier base may be optimal for the buyer when the suppliers adoption costs are sufficiently high we also show that while edi reduces the transaction costs of the buyer the upstream market tends to become more concentrated as a result of increased cost differentials these results provide one economic explanation of the fact that many companies have actually reduced their supplier base after implementing edi despite a significant reduction in their market transaction costs