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作者：Dranove, David; Garthwaite, Craig; Ody, Christopher
作者单位：Northwestern University
摘要：The theory of cost shifting posits that nonprofit firms share the pain of negative financial shocks with their stakeholders, for example, by raising prices. We examine how nonprofit hospitals responded to the sharp reductions in their assets caused by the 2008 stock market collapse. The average hospital did not raise prices, but hospitals with substantial market power did cost shift in this way. We find no evidence that hospitals reduced treatment costs. Hospitals eliminated but left unchanged...
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作者：Kim, Kyungmin; Pease, Marilyn
作者单位：University of Miami; University of Iowa
摘要：We analyze a dynamic trading model of adverse selection where a seller can increase the frequency of strategic price quotes. A low-quality seller benefits more from trade and, therefore, searches more intensively than a high-quality seller. This makes a seller's contact carry negative information but a seller's availability become a stronger indicator of high quality. In the stationary environment, the two effects exactly offset each other, and reducing search costs is weakly beneficial to the...
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作者：Ishihara, Akifumi
作者单位：National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies
摘要：We study a relational contracting model with two agents where each agent faces multiple tasks: effort toward the agent's own project and helping effort toward another agent's project. We show that the optimal task structure is either specialization without help or teamwork with a substantial amount of help: teamwork with a small amount of help is never optimal. Specialization with high-powered incentives can be implemented by relative performance evaluation. However, under teamwork, the evalua...
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作者：Bester, Helmut; Kraehmer, Daniel
作者单位：Free University of Berlin; University of Bonn
摘要：We show that in a bilateral relation with conflicting preferences and transferable utility it is unambiguously optimal to assign the authority over project decisions to the privately informed rather than the uninformed party. This holds irrespective of the degree of conflict and the distribution of private information. Under the optimal contract, the uninformed party is protected by an exit option, which it will exert when the decision maker has not chosen the promised decision. Exit terminate...
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作者：Wang, Zhu; Wright, Julian
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Richmond; National University of Singapore
摘要：This article explains why platforms such as Amazon and Visa rely predominantly on ad valorem fees, fees which increase proportionally with transaction prices. It also provides a new explanation for why ad valorem sales taxes are more desirable than specific taxes. The theory rests on the ability of ad valorem fees and taxes to achieve efficient price discrimination, given that the value of a transaction to buyers tends to vary proportionally with the cost of the good traded.
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作者：Peters, Bettina; Roberts, Mark J.; Van Anh Vuong; Fryges, Helmut
作者单位：Leibniz Association; Zentrum fur Europaische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW); Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University - University Park; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Cologne; University of Tasmania
摘要：This article estimates a dynamic structural model of discrete Research and Development (R&D) investment and quantifies its cost and long-run benefit for German manufacturing firms. The model incorporates linkages between R&D choice, product and process innovations, and future productivity and profits. The long-run payoff to R&D is the proportional difference in expected firm value generated by the investment. It increases firm value by 6.7% for the median firm in high-tech industries but only ...
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作者：Taylor, Greg
作者单位：University of Oxford
摘要：Consumers tend to browse products they are interested in and firms often invest resources in selling to them. A consequence, I show, is that it is optimal for a firm to increase the cost of browsing (even though this drives away potential customers) because doing so allows it to target sales efforts at those consumers most likely to buy. Despite representing pure waste, this can increase welfare by facilitating efficient allocation of sales or marketing resources. For a similar reason, consume...
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作者：Gross, Daniel P.
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Performance feedback is ubiquitous in competitive settings where new products are developed. This article introduces a fundamental tension between incentives and improvement in the provision of feedback. Using a sample of 4294 commercial logo design tournaments, I show that feedback reduces participation but improves the quality of subsequent submissions, with an ambiguous effect on high-quality output. To evaluate this trade-off, I develop a procedure to estimate agents' effort costs and simu...
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作者：Lubensky, Dmitry
作者单位：Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington
摘要：Manufacturers frequently post nonbinding public price recommendations, but neither the rationale for this practice nor its impact on prices is well understood. I develop a model in which recommendations signal a manufacturer's production cost to searching consumers, who then form beliefs about retail prices. Increasing search makes consumers reject offers for the manufacturer's and competitors' products more often, and I show that both consumers and the manufacturer prefer more search when the...
