The aim of this paper is to explore the reactions to the Bolshevik Revolution of one group of critics from the left: those who saw it as ushering in a new form of capitalism. The controversy over state capitalism had both theoretical and practical significance. At the analytical level it presented an important test of Marx’s conception of historical materialism, which had been formulated in a l...

It is well known that if a monopolist serving a market of substitute products can perfectly price discriminate, the socially optimal set of products (or ‘characteristics’) will be supplied. This follows since the profits of the perfectly discriminating monopolist are equal to the consumers’ surplus. Thus the monopolist will provide the product selection that maximizes consumers’ surplus [see Wh...

The paper deals with failures of capitalism or free market and presents the results of economic analysis by applying a logistic capital growth model. The application of a logistic growth model for analysis of economic bubbles reveals the fundamental causes of bubble formation—economic paradoxes related with phenomena of saturated markets: the paradox of growing returnability and the paradoxes o...

This article points to a distinct puzzle in the analyses of capitalism that can be found in the works of Weber and Schumpeter, and gives a new introduction to their analysis of capitalism. Both Weber and Schumpeter wrote voluminously on capitalism, as testified to by such giant works as Economy and Society (Weber, 1978c [1922]) and Business Cycles (Schumpeter, 1939). One can also discern a dist...

Using an empirical framework based on the Mussa-Rosen model of monopoly quality choice, we calculate the degree of quality degradation in cable television markets and the impact of regulation on those choices. We find lower bounds of quality degradation ranging from 11 to 45 percent of offered service qualities. Furthermore, cable operators in markets with local regulatory oversight offer signi...

We model the market for news as a two-sided market where newspapers sell news to readers who value accuracy and sell space to advertisers who value advert-receptive readers. In this setting, monopolistic newspapers under-report or bias news that sufficiently reduces advertiser profits. Paradoxically, increasing the size of advertising eventually leads competing newspapers to reduce advertiser b...

A previous research demonstrates the profitability of partial refund policies in a monopoly setting, there is a certain lack of ubiquity in practice about these refunds in competitive service markets. This raises the question of how a partial refund policy may work and whether it is even sustainable in a competitive environment. This study investigates how competition may influence the profitab...

In this paper, we compare the conditions under which a government engages in corruption via bribing the media across two alternative settings: a media monopoly versus a media duopoly. A key distinction we make between the two settings is that unlike monopoly, in a duopoly a …rm’s individual capacity to expose the government may be lower than the collective capacity of both the …rms because the ...