This paper investigates the economic implications of storage behavior under imperfect competition. It evaluates the economic dynamics implied by a storage firm under alternative market structures. This includes perfect competition as well as imperfect competition under Cournot behavior. The conceptual analysis is used to specify and estimate a model of storage behavior, with an econometric appl...

We provide a broad characterization of the supply chain settings in which perfect coordination can be achieved with a simple wholesale pricing scheme based on constant unit wholesale prices or a single quantity discount scheme. We confine ourselves to two-echelon chains with a single supplier servicing a network of retailers who compete with each other by selecting retail prices (Bertrand compe...

This paper proposes a new look at the so-called ‘present-perfect puzzle’. It suggests that it is in fact part of a bigger problem, concerning all tenses in a language situating an event one step before the moment of utterance. I argue that present perfects compete with simple past tenses, and that the distribution of these tenses shows signs of the impact of this competition. The outcome of the...

We study the steady state of a market with incoming cohorts of buyers and sellers who are matched pairwise and bargain under private information. A friction parameter is τ , the length of the time period until the next meeting. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the convergence of mechanism outcomes to perfect competition at the linear rate in τ , which is shown to be the faste...

51 WALTER BLOCK is the Harold E. Wirth eminent scholar endowed chair in economics, WILLIAM BARNETT II is associate professor of economics, and STUART WOOD is associate professor of economics and finance at Loyola University, New Orleans. Block would like to thank David Kennedy, Tony Sullivan, and the Board of Directors of the Earhart Foundation for financial support used to write this paper. An...

T paper investigates the effects of a limited consumer memory on the price competition between firms. It studies a specific aspect of memory—namely, the categorization of available price information that the consumers may need to recall for decision making. This paper analyzes competition between firms in a market with uninformed consumers who do not compare prices, informed consumers who compa...

Perfect competition has long been the standard by which economists have judged the market’s ability to achieve an efficient social outcome. The competitive process, unfettered by the imperfections discussed below, forges an outcome in which goods and services are produced at their lowest possible cost, and market equilibrium is achieved at the point at which the cost of the last unit supplied j...

Recently, scholars working in the field of modern Austrian economics have wondered about what this literature might offer for an understanding of the nature of modern business organizations (for example, Foss 1994, 1997b; Sautet 1998; Mathews 1998). In this article, we examine the received literature on firms and strategies and find that Austrian economics has important contributions to make in...

The origin of economic crises is a key problem for economics. We present a model of long-run competitive markets to show that the multiplicity of behaviors in an economic system, over a long time scale, emerge as statistical regularities (perfectly competitive markets obey Bose-Einstein statistics and purely monopolistic-competitive markets obey Boltzmann statistics) and that how interaction am...