Standard economic models of groundwater management assume perfect transmissivity (i.e., the aquifer behaves as a bathtub), no external effects of groundwater stocks, and/or homogenous agents. In this article, we develop a model relaxing these assumptions. Although our model generalizes to an arbitrary number of cells, we are able to obtain key insights with a two-cell finite-horizon differentia...

A large literature has documented striking increases in wage inequality over the past three decades in many advanced economies, including the U.S., the U.K., and Germany (e.g., Autor and Katz, 1999; Dustmann et al, 2009; Autor and Acemoglu, 2010). Using standard neoclassical economic models, analysts have attempted to partition these observed trends in the wage structure into components due to ...

Time is an important aspect of health economic evaluation, as the timing and duration of clinical events, healthcare interventions and their consequences all affect estimated costs and effects. These issues should be reflected in the design of health economic models. This article considers three important aspects of time in modelling: (1) which cohorts to simulate and how far into the future to...

Qualitative analysis has a long tradition in economic modeling . The application of mathematical methods, either quantitative or qualitative, to analyse an economic model stipulates strong assumptions. These assumptions restrict the analysis on a special case of the more general, verbally stated model. Furthermore the application of these methods is successful in analysing small models only . I...

___________________________ Author’s Note (November, 2014): I was wary of revisiting an essay that was both informal and dated but found it less horrible than I had feared—perhaps because I have been stuck in a rut for 15 years! For an update on Section 2 (i.e., relational contracts, management, and leadership), see Gibbons and Henderson (2012). For an update on Section 1 (i.e., economic models...

The breeding of crocodilians is still a recent activity in Brazil. Its peak was in the 1990's, but it has gaps in its production, as there are no norms for the commercial breeding of these animals in captivity. However, its economic potential is great, and the search for ecological balance and viability of commercial production has become a challenge among farmers of this activity. Therefor, th...

Throughout mnany less developed economies of the world, especially those of tropical Africa, a curious economic phenomenon is presently taking place. Despite the existence of positive marginal products in agriculture and significant levels of urban unemployment, rural-urban labor migration not only continues to exist, but indeed, appears to be accelerating. Conventional economic models with the...

This Chapter provides a survey of the economics literature on multi-sided platforms with particular focus on competition policy issues, including market definition, mergers, monopolization, and coordinated behavior. It provides a survey of the general industrial organization theory of multi-sided platforms and then considers various issues concerning the application of antitrust analysis to mul...

Indeed, over the last few decades, a multiplicity of social “actors” (including institutions, enterprises, non-profit organisations, as well as individual citizens and their associations) have proved themselves capable of acting outside of the mainstream economic models and, in so doing, provide benchmarks that might well provide the answers to the most pressing concerns and challenges of our t...

Both climate change and technical change are uncertain. In this paper we show the importance of including both uncertainties when modeling for policy analysis. We then develop an approach for incorporating uncertainty of technical change into climate change policy analysis. We define and demonstrate a protocol for bottom-up expert assessments about prospects for technologies. We then describe a...