RAND Journal of Economics articles from December 2004

RAND Journal of Economics archives from December 2004

Consumer privacy and the market for customer information.
December 22, 2004... I investigate consumer privacy and the market for customer information in electronic retailing. The value of customer information derives from the ability of Internet firms to identify individual consumers and charge them personalized prices. I...

Cartel pricing dynamics in the presence of an antitrust authority.(Antitrust laws )
December 22, 2004... Cartel pricing is characterized when firms are concerned about creating suspicions that a cartel has formed. Balancing concerns about maintaining the stability of the cartel with those of a voiding detection, the cartel may either (i) gradually...

Capital heterogeneity: does it matter? Fundamental Q and investment on a panel of Italian firms.
December 22, 2004... We study the determinants of firms' investment decisions with heterogeneous-capital goods. We exploit a panel of small and medium-sized firms, which allows us to distinguish between purchases and sales of capital goods. We consider separately...

Allocating transmission to mitigate market power in electricity networks.
December 22, 2004... Whether transmission contracts increase or mitigate market power depends crucially on the allocation of transmission rights. In an efficiently arbitraged uniform-price auction, generators will only obtain contracts that mitigate their market...

Internal competition for corporate resources and incentives in teams.
December 22, 2004... Invoking the free-rider problem in teams, many, observers find profit sharing in large organizations puzzling, because it should have negligible incentive effects. We show that if a firm can be decomposed into two separate teams whose outputs...

Bilateral control with vertical contracts.
December 22, 2004... A supplier is known to be subject to opportunism when contracting secretly with downstream competitors, particularly when downstream firms have "passive beliefs." We stress that in many situations, an equilibrium with passive beliefs" may not...

Multi-unit ownership in franchising: evidence from the fast-food industry in Texas.(Industry Overview)
December 22, 2004... We use data on all the new restaurants opened in Texas between 1980 and 1995 by seven of the largest nationally franchised fast-food chains to examine empirically the extent of multi-unit ownership in franchised chains and the way in which...

Is perfect price discrimination really efficient? An analysis of free entry.
December 22, 2004... We analyze models of product differentiation with perfect price discrimination and free entry. With a fixed number of firms, and in the absence of coordination failures, perfect price discrimination provides incentives for firms to choose...

Measuring spillovers from industrial R&D: on the importance of geographic and technological proximity.(research and development)
December 22, 2004... I present evidence to suggest that an important share of the apparent geographic localization of spillovers from industrial R&D may be an artifact of other agglomerative forces. A production-function framework is used to examine the role of...

Asset ownership and contractibility of interaction.
December 22, 2004... In a property-rights framework, I study how organizational form and quantity contracts interact in generating investment incentives. The model nests standard property-rights and hold-up models as special cases. I admit general message-dependent...

A comparison of stock market mechanisms.
December 22, 2004... I analyze a multi-asset market under two trading mechanisms. In the first (the unrestricted system), traders' demand for each asset depends on all equilibrium prices, and prices reflect the information contained in all order flows; in the...