Economic theory that underlies many empirical microeconomic applications predicts that treatment responses depend on individuals’ characteristics and location on the outcome distribution. Using data from a large-scale Pakistani school report card experiment, we consider tests for treatment...

We combine two extensions of the differentiated duopoly model of Dixit (1979), namely Caminal and Vives (1996) and Brander and Spencer (2015a,b), to analyze the effect of consumer learning on firms' incentives to differentiate their products in models of Cournot and Bertrand competition....

Do firms under relative payoffs maximizing (RPM) behavior always choose a strategy profile that results in tougher competition compared to firms under absolute payoffs maximizing (APM) behavior? In this paper we will address this issue through a simple model of symmetric oligopoly where firms...

Including the entry decision in a Bertrand model with imperfectly informed consumers, we introduce a trade-off at the level of social welfare. On the one hand, market transparency is benefi cial when the number of firms is exogenously given. On the other, a higher degree of market transparency...

Hotellings berühmtes "Prinzip der minimalen Differenzierung" behauptet, dass zwei Firmen, die sich miteinander in räumlichem Wettbewerb befinden, dieselbe Position wählen. Wenn man räumlichen Wettbewerb als Modellierung von Produktdifferenzierung versteht, bedeutet dieses, dass die Firmen...

Our study proposes a novel mechanism to reduce information asymmetry about product quality between buyers and sellers. Product testing organizations like Consumer Reports (US) and Stiftung Warentest (Germany) seek to reduce this asymmetry by providing credible information. However, limited...

We develop a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms à la Melitz (2003), where both the government and firms can invest into R&D to improve the country’s technological potential. A higher technological potential raises the average productivity of firms, thus implying lower consumer...