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作者：Armstrong, Mark; Vickers, John
作者单位：University of Oxford; University of Oxford
摘要：We study multiproduct firms in the contexts 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 discuss a tractable class of preferences that involve a generalized form of homotheticity. Profit-maximizing quantities are proportional to efficient quantities. We d...
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作者：Aguiar, Luis; Waldfogel, Joel
作者单位：University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We explore the consequence of quality unpredictability for the welfare benefit of new products, using recent developments in recorded music as our context. We quantify the effects of new music on welfare using an explicit structural model of demand and entry with potentially unpredictable product quality. On the basis of plausible forecasting models of expected appeal, a tripling of the choice set according to expected quality adds substantially more consumer surplus as the usual long-tail ben...
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作者：Battaglini, Marco; Patacchini, Eleonora
作者单位：Cornell University
摘要：This paper studies how interest groups allocate campaign contributions when congressmen are connected by social ties. We establish conditions for the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium in pure strategies for the contribution game and characterize the associated allocation of the interest groups' moneys. While the allocations are generally complex functions of the environment (the voting function, the legislators' preferences, and the social network topology), they are simple, monotonically...
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作者：Durante, Ruben; Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina
作者单位：Pompeu Fabra University; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Paris School of Economics
摘要：Politicians may strategically time unpopular measures to coincide with newsworthy events that distract the media and the public. We test this hypothesis in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We find that Israeli attacks are more likely to occur when US news on the following day is dominated by important predictable events. Strategic timing applies to attacks that bear risk of civilian casualties and are not too costly to postpone. Content analysis suggests that Israel's strategy ...
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作者：Kehoe, Timothy J.; Ruhl, Kim J.; Steinberg, Joseph B.
作者单位：University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Minneapolis; National Bureau of Economic Research; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University - University Park; University of Toronto
摘要：Since the early 1990s, as the United States borrowed heavily from the rest of the world, employment in the US goods-producing sector has fallen. We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model with several mechanisms that could generate declining goods-sector employment: foreign borrowing, nonhomothetic preferences, and differential productivity growth across sectors. We find that only 15.1 percent of the decline in goods-sector employment from 1992 to 2012 stems from US trade deficits; most ...
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作者：Bouton, Laurent; Llorente-Saguer, Aniol; Malherbe, Frederic
作者单位：Georgetown University; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research; University of London; Queen Mary University London; University of London; London Business School
摘要：We study unanimous decision making under incomplete information. We argue that unanimous decision rules are not all equivalent. We show that majority rules with veto power are (i) Pareto superior to commonly used unanimous rules and (ii) ex ante efficient in a broad class of situations.
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作者：Philippe, Arnaud; Ouss, Aurelie
作者单位：University of Bristol; University of Pennsylvania
摘要：We explore how television broadcasting of unrelated criminal justice events affects sentencing. Exploiting as-good-as-random variation in news content before a verdict, we find that sentences are 3 months longer when the verdict is reached after coverage of crime. Sentences increase with media exposure to crime, not crime itself, and the effect tapers off quickly. Our results suggest that professional experience and expertise mitigate the effect of irrelevant external information. This paper h...
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作者：de Melo, Rafael Lopes
作者单位：University of Edinburgh
摘要：Why do firms pay different wages? Empirical evidence suggests the presence of substantial differences in firm pay controlling for worker skill. Moreover, these differences are uncorrelated with skills, indicating the absence of sorting. I show that the face value interpretation is inconsistent with evidence on coworker segregation. I interpret the evidence by applying a sorting model and show that the correlation is biased. I identify nonmonotonicities in wages as the reason for this bias and ...
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作者：Apesteguia, Jose; Ballester, Miguel A.
作者单位：ICREA; Pompeu Fabra University; University of Oxford
摘要：Suppose that, when evaluating two alternatives x and y by means of a parametric utility function, low values of the parameter indicate a preference for x and high values indicate a preference for y. We say that a stochastic choice model is monotone whenever the probability of choosing x is decreasing in the preference parameter. We show that the standard use of random utility models in the context of risk and time preferences may sharply violate this monotonicity property and argue that their ...
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作者：Atkin, David; Faber, Benjamin; Gonzalez-Navarro, Marco
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：The arrival of global retail chains in developing countries is causing a radical transformation in the way households source their consumption. This paper draws on a rich collection of Mexican microdata to estimate the effect of foreign supermarket entry on household welfare and decomposes this effect into six channels. We find that foreign entry causes large welfare gains for the average household predominantly driven by a reduction in the cost of livingboth through price reductions at domest...
