We develop a partial equilibrium, perfectly competitive framework of a (potentially) vertically integrated industry. There are three types of firms: upstream firms that use primary factors to produce an intermediate good; downstream firms that use primary factors and intermediate goods to produce a final good; and vertically integrated firms that do both. We establish conditions under which ver...

A two-region model is proposed in this paper. Manufactured goods can be produced with cottage technology under constant returns to scale or with modern technology using differentiated intermediate goods, which are produced with increasing returns to scale technology. In the model, there may be multiple equilibria, and, in such cases, the initial conditions determine the equilibrium that the eco...

A generic model for the monetary flow in multi-level marketing schemes for virtual goods, so called incentive management systems, is introduced and analysed. It is shown that such schemes can in principle be fair, and it is argued that they can be viably realised if the value of the distributed good is positive. It is shown how the monetary incentive a buyer receives through the scheme can be p...

ness of an element is the ratio of in-degrees over in-degrees plus out-degrees of the element, and ranges from 0 to l (Pieters et al. 1995). Elements with high abstractness scores are

We analyze a dynamic version of the Akerlof±Wilson ``lemons'' market in a competitive durable good setting. There is a ®xed set of sellers with private information about the quality of their wares. The price mechanism sorts sellers of different qualities into different time periodsÐprices and average quality of goods traded increase over time. Goods of all qualities are traded in ®nite time. Ma...

Amounts of empirical evidence, ranging from microbial cooperation to collective hunting, suggests public goods produced often nonlinearly depend on the total amount of contribution. The implication of such nonlinear public goods for the evolution of cooperation is not well understood. There is also little attention paid to the divisibility nature of individual contribution amount, divisible vs....

I characterize a finite additive utility representation for preferences over menus. The numbers of both positive and negative components in this representation are expressed explicitly in terms of preference. These expressions can be used to characterize models of temptation, perfectionism, context effects, and other phenomena. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: D81