Slack Taking and Burden Dumping

Competition and unilateral dumping

This paper presents an analysis of the effects of market structure on the propensity of firms to dump goods. The analysis of Brander and Krugman is extended to show that in the presence of transportation costs, bilateral intra-industry trade is not possible without dumping. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this paper finds that firms in markets with a large number of domestic competitors ar...

Slack

Taking aim at hospital "dumping" of emergency department patients: the COBRA strikes back.

Slack Time and Innovation

We explore how slack time might drive the quantity and quality of creative projects. We model slack time as continguous blocks of low opportunity cost time. We model contiguous blocks of time as particularly useful for complex projects. The model predicts that more creative projects are produced during slack time because it is low opportunity cost time. The model also predicts that slack time g...

Slack Time and Innovation

Traditional innovation models assume that new ideas are developed up to the point where the benefit of the marginal project is just equal to the cost. Because labor is a key input to innovation, when the opportunity cost of time is lower, such as during school breaks or time o↵ from work, then such models predict that the number of ideas developed will be greater, but the average quality will b...