An influential thesis [Kuran, 2011, The Long Divergence] locates the economic failure of the Middle East in Islamic legal arrangements that laid the basis for organizational deficiencies.  This article critically scrutinizes this thesis using the lens of political economy and argues that...

Traditionally, the scholarly journal market operates so that research institutions are charged high prices and the wider public is often excluded altogether, while authors can usually publish for free and commercial publishers enjoy high profits.  Two forms of open access regulation can...

Why do so many high-priced acquisitions of entrepreneurial firms take place in network industries? We develop a theory of commercialization (entry or sale) in network industries showing that high equilibrium acquisition prices are driven by the incumbents' desire to prevent rivals from acquiring...

We develop a framework in which: (i) a firm can have a new product tested publicly before launch; and (ii) tests vary in toughness, holding expertise fixed.  Price flexibility boosts the strong positive impact on consumer beliefs of passing a tough test and mitigates the strong negative impact...

This paper examines the evolution of a skew distribution of firm sizes from the viewpoint of the 'Bounds' approach to market structure. It confines attention to the role played by non-strategic factors (statistical independence, and cost side effects). A model is proposed, which leads to a...

We show that introducing an external capital market with information asymmetry into a product market model reduces opportunistic substitution of sub-standard goods and encourages producers to concentrate on long-run reputation building.  We test this result with a laboratory experiment.  We...

This paper evaluates alternative strategic models of competition and market structure in online retailing, and makes comparisons with traditional retailing. Online consumers are less concerned than traditional consumers about spatial characteristics and more concerned about hidden quality...

Herding arises when an agents private information is swamped by public information in what Jackson and Kalai (1997) call a recurring game. The agent will fail to reveal his own information and will follow the actions of his predecessor and, as a result, useful information is lost, which might...

Ultimatum games have been extensively used in experimental studies. By studying the consequences that restrictions shared by ultimatum games have in subject`s behaviour, this paper argues that some results are falsified by design constraints. This paper also presets a taxonomy of certification,...

We examine some of the factors that might influence the quality of information produced in discussion groups on the internet, such as USENET and the WELL. In particular, we look at the impact of various different pricing structures, and compare regimes in which anonymity is enforced with regimes...