Empirical studies have suggested that stock returns can be predicted by financial variables such as the dividend-price ratio. However, these studies typically ignore the high persistence of predictor variables, which can make first-order asymptotics a poor approximation in finite samples. Using a more accurate asymptotic approximation, we propose two methods to deal with the persistence problem...

BACKGROUND Managed competition was introduced into the health care system in several countries including the Netherlands, although effects of competition of both providers and health insurers on the price of health care are inconclusive. We investigated the association between competition of both providers (care groups) and health insurers and the price of disease management programmes (DMPs). ...

Most analysis of market power assumes that managers are perfect agents for shareholders. This paper relaxes that assumption. When managers of a multi-product firm exert unobservable effort to improve product quality, price coordination incentives tradeoff with effort incentives. This makes some intra-firm price competition optimal, explaining why many multi-product firms allow for competition b...

The price war is the main market competition way for Chinese e-commerce retailers. Based on the price data from JD, Amazon and Dangdang, the paper conducted an empirical research on the price competition in B2C e-commerce market in China in terms of the average price level, minimum price level, price differential level and price variation. The research results show that the average price levels...

Comparing Cournot and Bertrand Equilibria Revisited by Jim Y. Jin This paper compares Cournot and Bertrand equilibria with mixed products, linear demand and cost functions. It is found that a firm's price (output) need not be higher (lower) in Cournot equilibrium. However, given any number of firms and a mixture of complement and substitute products, every firm's price margin/output ratio is al...

This study assesses the impact of competition on quality and price in the English care/nursing homes market. Considering the key institutional features, we use a theoretical model to assess the conditions under which further competition could increase or reduce quality. A dataset comprising the population of 10,000 care homes was used. We constructed distance/travel-time weighted competition me...