By building on theoretical work by Mills and Schumann (1985) and Ungern-Sternberg (1990) this paper provides evidence on the determinants of two dimensions of flexibility, the flexibility in adjusting aggregate output over time ("tactical flexibility") as well as the ability to switch quickly between products ("operational flexibility"). Econometric analysis of a sample of 40.000 farms in Upper...

This paper analyses the incentive properties of prospective payment systems for hospital contracts, a key feature in many health systems’ reforms. Building on current literature, the model explicitly allows for the existence of waiting time, modelled as adversely affecting patients’ utility and therefore reducing social welfare. The model shows that rewarding hospitals for their demand leads to...

Using a structural model of demand for automobile engine variants, this paper finds that there is second-degree price discrimination: markups increase with engine size. Still, average markups are lower than when models have just one engine. The paper develops the first empirical demand framework suitable for markets with variants. There is an unobserved product characteristic and a consumer-spe...

In the postal sector, the net cost of universal service depends on the content of the service, the postal market characteristics and the country’s geographical configuration. These three groups of factors affect both the direct cost of providing the service and the extent of competition on the market. In this paper, we consider countries with different geographical characteristics and we show t...

We extend the ‘no-haggling’ result of Riley and Zeckhauser (1983) to the class of linear multiproduct monopoly problems when the buyer’s valuations are smoothly distributed. In particular we show that there is no loss for the seller in optimizing over mechanisms such that all allocations belong to the boundary of the feasible set. The set of potentially optimal mechanisms can be further restric...

Alternative market structures are distinguishable by the degree of parallel action exhibited by producers. We show that the correlation between output levels varies systematically with the degree of interdependence among firms, and establish an ordering among alternative behavioral hypotheses (Cournot, Stackelberg, Edgeworth/Bertrand, collusion, and perfect competition). Because the ordering is...

Theorem 1 Suppose X is a smooth toric Fano 4-fold. Then X admits a totally nondegenerate abelian surface if X = P4, if X = P1 × P3 (type B4), or if X is a product of two smooth toric Del Pezzo surfaces (i.e. of type C4, D13, H8, L7, L8, L9, Q10, Q11, K4, U5, S2 × S2, S2 × S3 or S3 × S3). Otherwise there is no such embedding, unless possibly X is of type C3, D7, D10, D11, D14, D17, D18, G3, G4, ...