This paper empirically investigates three hypotheses regarding biases of National Basketball Association (NBA) referees. Using a sample of 28,388 quarter-level observations from six seasons, we find that referees make calls that favor home teams, teams losing during games, and teams losing in playoff series. All three biases are likely to increase league revenues. In order to distinguish betwee...

In this paper we analyze the welfare effects of third-degree price discrimination when competitive pressure varies across markets. In particular, we study the economic aspects of the Robinson-Patman Act associated with the “meeting competition defense.” Using equilibrium models, the main result we find is that this defense might be used successfully in cases of primary line injury precisely whe...

Exploiting a unique data set containing transactions data from a panel of 769 Chinese stateowned enterprises between 1980 and 1989, this paper tests microeconomic implications of a pervasive form of corruption—official diversion of under-priced, in-plan goods to the market. Corruption has the predicted effects on resource allocation. Official under-pricing of in-plan goods, which lowers the mar...

Professional sports teams receive large public subsidies for new facility construction. Empirical research suggests that these subsidies cannot be justified by tangible or intangible economic benefits. We develop a model of bargaining between local governments and teams over subsidies that includes league expansion decisions. The model features loss aversion by fans that captures lost utility w...

This paper offers a new theory of destructive competition. We compare minimum resale price maintenance (RPM) to retail market clearing in a model with a monopolistic manufacturer selling to competitive retailers. In both the RPM and Flexible-Pricing Games, retailers must order inventories before the realization of demand uncertainty. We find that manufacturer profits and equilibrium inventories...

This paper analyses whether scale economies exists in the UK telecommunications industry. The approach employed differs from other UK studies in that panel data for a range of companies is used. This increases the number of observations and thus allows potentially for more robust tests for global subadditivity of the cost function. The main findings from the study reveal that although the resul...

BACKGROUND The immunogenic Brucella abortus ribosomal protein L7/L12 is a promising candidate antigen for the development of subunit vaccines against brucellosis. OBJECTIVE This study was aimed to evaluate the protection of recombinant Human Serum Albumin (HAS)-L7/L12 fusion protein in Balb/c mice. METHODS The amplified L7/L12 gene was cloned in pYHSA5 vector, pYHSA5-L7/L12 construct was tr...

We consider an infinitely repeated oligopoly in which at each period firms not only serve the spot market by either competing in prices or quantities but also have the opportunity to trade forward contracts. Contrary to the pro-competitive results of finite-horizon models, we find that the possibility of forward trading allows firms to sustain collusive profits that otherwise would not be possi...