Problems of allocating indivisible goods to agents in an efficient and fair manner without money have long been investigated in the literature. The random assignment problem is one of them, where we are given a fixed feasible (available) set of indivisible goods and a profile of ordinal preferences over the goods, one for each agent, and we determine an assignment of goods to agents in a random...

I characterize a finite additive utility representation for preferences over menus. The numbers of both positive and negative components in this representation are expressed explicitly in terms of preference. These expressions can be used to characterize models of temptation, perfectionism, context effects, and other phenomena. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: D81

We consider a (pure) public goods provision problem with voluntary participation in a quasi-linear economy. We propose a new hybrid solution concept, the free-ridingproof core (FRP-Core), which endogenously determines a contribution group, public goods provision level, and how to share the provision costs. The FRP-Core is always nonempty in public goods economies but does not usually achieve gl...

Positive externalities characterize the consumption of a majority class of information goods and services such as software, e-mail, and online content and services including virtual communities. We show that network externality is critical for the market segmentation and product line decisions of an information goods seller. With externality, a monopoly of multiple existing products offers exac...

Counterfeiting causes hundreds of billions dollars of losses around the world every year. Due to the growing prominence of online commerce, the seriousness of the situation could soon become much worse. Hence, reaching a clear understanding of the fundamental economic incentives behind this practice is of vital importance. In this paper, we investigate a problem within which a firm selling a co...

Simple additive weighting is a well-known method for scoring and ranking alternative options based on multiple attributes. However the pitfalls associated with this approach are not widely appreciated. For example, the apparently innocuous step of normalizing the various attribute data in order to obtain comparable figures leads to markedly different rankings depending on which normalization is...

Videogames now enable players to spend virtual fortunes on exotic virtual goods and even create and sell virtual artefacts. Online consumers may also browse endlessly through virtual marketplaces and create and display virtual goods. These virtual commodities are desired and enjoyed as if they were real, but are not actually bought, or owned in a material sense – often resulting in frustration ...

the main purpose of this paper is to examine the convergence of price-levels of tradable goods in comparison to that of services (non-tradable) under the free trade among iranian provinces over 2007- 2012. this comparison has been achieved by applying the pair-wise approach which has been recently developed by pesaran (2005). in this approach, the time series models (adf, df-gls and kpss unit r...