Fixed operating costs draw a sharp distinction between endogenous growth based on horizontal and vertical innovation: a larger number of product lines puts pressure on an economy’s resources; greater productivity of existing product lines does not. Consequently, the only plausible engine of endogenous growth is vertical innovation whereby progress along the quality or cost ladder does not requi...

We study the role of consumers’ psychological bargaining costs associated with the decision to bargain in a retail setting. First, we use a simple model to show how a retailer’s optimal pricing strategy (fixed pricing vs. bargaining) varies with consumers’ bargaining costs and the retailer’s marginal costs. We then prove how these fixed bargaining costs can be nonparametrically identified separ...

Whether a firm is able to attract foreign capital and whether it may participate at the export market depends on whether the fixed costs associated with doing so are at least covered by the incremental operating profits. This paper provides evidence that success for some firms in attracting foreign investors and in exporting appears to reduce the associated fixed costs with exporting or foreign...

Maximising dividends is one classical stability criterion in actuarial risk theory. Motivated by the fact that are paid periodically real life, periodic dividend strategies were recently introduced (Albrecher et al. 2011). In this paper, we incorporate fixed transaction costs into model and study optimal strategy with for spectrally negative Lévy processes. The value function of a (bu,bl) calcu...