This paper analyses price competition between two firms producing horizontally and vertically differentiated goods. These are assumed to be credence goods, as consumers can hardly ascertain the quality of the commodities. We provide sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique price...

Expanding variety and the number of offered products is attractive for a firm to fit customer needs. Nevertheless, the greater complexity and the proliferation of stock-keeping units (SKUs) without substantial differentiation may not substantially improve customer satisfaction while raising...

The aggregate black-box approach of conventional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) limits its usefulness in situations where the observation is the result of independent decision making in sub-units (sub-DMUs), sequentially linked through processes or semi-finished products. The situation is...

Effective supply chain management relies on information integration and implementation of best practice techniques across the chain. Supply chains are examples of complex multi-stage systems with temporal and causal interrelations, operating multi-input and multi-output production and services...

Supply chain management involves the selection, coordination and motivation of independently operated suppliers. However the central planner's perspective in operations management translates poorly to vertically separated chains, where suppliers may have rational myopic reasons to object to full...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a powerful tool for measuring the relative efficiencies of a set of decision making units (DMUs) such as schools and bank branches that transform multiple inputs to multiple outputs. In centralized decision-making systems, management normally imposes common...

We develop a new methodology to identify high-end variety exporters in French firm- level data. We show that they do not export to many more countries, but they export to more distant ones. This comes with a greater geographic diversification of their aggregate exports. These facts are explained...

The basic idea of crowdfunding is to raise external finance from a large audience (the “crowd”), where each individual provides a very small amount, instead of soliciting a small group of sophisticated investors. The paper develops a model that associates crowdfunding with pre-ordering and...

In this paper, we provide a general model discussing the impact of non-homothetic preferences on the vertical comparative advantage of countries, i.e. the existence of demand-based determinants of the quality content of production and exports. We show that while average income positively impacts...

We model a labor market in which workers’ level of education might be a signal of skills. We show that whenever the wage premium for education increases over time – as it might happen under skill biased technological progress – the investment in education needed to sustain a separating...