• What are experience goods? For many agricultural and food items, consumers cannot assess food quality until after consumption. In the economics and marketing literature, these goods are referred to as experience goods (Nelson, 1970). When purchasing experience goods, consumers search for quality cues to inform them about their product choice. In this setting, producers’ reputations become imp...

The advent of automated commerce and the ability to electronically distribute information goods, or articles, have created a new set of problems for producers of information content. Since information goods have negligible marginal cost, producers are presented with a huge space of potential bundling and pricing strategies to choose from. Producers potentially have two separate decision problem...

In order to attain waste reduction and the closing of material life cycles, the Dutch Ministry of Environment made an attempt to sign a covenant with the producers and importers of household appliances (the so-called white and brown goods). The negotiations started in 1992 involving all stakeholders: representatives of the producers and importers, the government (state, provincial and local lev...

In this article the notion of exemplars is developed to study valuation processes. It argues that exemplary goods are an important ‘judgment device’ on markets of singular goods, which has so far been ignored in the literature. The article draws on Hannah Arendt’s theory of exemplars, as well as literature from the philosophy of science and psychology to construct the new concept. Exemplars are...

We use a dynamic monopolistic competition model to show that an economy that inherits a small range of specialized inputs can be trapped into a lower stage of development. The limited availability of specialized inputs forces the final goods producers to use a labor intensive technology, which in turn implies a small inducement to introduce new intermediate inputs. The start-up costs, which mak...

The information asymmetries inherent in credence goods have typically led economists to conclude these markets require well-defined quality standards and third-party verification that producers are meeting those standards. Nonetheless, many producers of credence goods appear to be opting out of certification. Why? This paper builds in previous research and develops a theoretical framework to th...

This paper proposes an analytical framework to examine the market and welfare impacts of GMOs, when some consumers refuse genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and when two supply channels are segregated (one for goods that containing GMOs and one for non-genetically-modified identity-preserved goods). Our analytical framework begins at the level of individual farmers, handlers and consumers, t...

Dynamic Demand for New and Used Durable Goods without Physical Depreciation Masakazu Ishihara Doctor of Philosophy Joseph L. Rotman School of Management University of Toronto 2011 This thesis studies the interaction between new and used durable goods without physical depreciation. In product categories such as CDs/DVDs and video games, the competition from used goods markets has been viewed as ...

The production of diffusible molecules that promote survival and growth is common in bacterial and eukaryotic cell populations, and can be considered a form of cooperation between cells. While evolutionary game theory shows that producers and non-producers can coexist in well-mixed populations, there is no consensus on the possibility of a stable polymorphism in spatially structured populations...