In this paper we investigate the possible presence of switching costs when consumers are offered the opportunity to change their basic health insurance provider. We focus on the specific case of Switzerland which implemented a pure form of competition in basic health insurance markets. We identify several barriers to switching, namely choice overload, status quo bias, the possession of suppleme...

This paper characterizes the distribution of jobs in a relational contracting model where both employed and unemployed workers compete for jobs. In equilibrium, identical firms offer a continuous distribution of contracts, with some firms offering high-wage, high-productivity contracts and others offering low-wage, low-productivity contracts. An increase in on-the-job-search affects equilibrium...

EBITA (earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization of intangible assets) has increased at a compound annual rate of 26%. The Class A Common Stock price has grown in value at a compound annual rate of 27%. By effectively implementing our strategies and delivering value, we have achieved one of the strongest growth records in the publishing industry. How does a firm's optimal output choice ...

Intellectual property (IP) rights differ from ordinary property rights. Historically, societies have tolerated monopolistic inefficiency from IP protection to incentivize intellectual asset creation. This paper considers how competitive markets can optimally allocate resources, bypassing that monopolistic inefficiency. It departs from earlier related work in three ways: First, it allows economi...

Recently, there has been renewed interest about incomplete security markets. Hart (1975) provided an example of nonexistence of competitive equilibria for incomplete real securities, which are claims to commodity bundles. Given this finding, Duffie and Shafer (1985, 1986a, b) prove generic existence of competitive equilibria of incomplete real security markets. Husseini et al. (1990) Geanakoplo...

this paper represents a complete survey on generation companies’ (gencos’) optimal bidding strategy problem in restructured power markets. in this regard after an introduction to competitive electricity markets, concept of optimal bidding strategy is presented. considering large amount of works accomplished in this area a novel classification is implemented in order to categorize the existing d...

The recent collapse of bandwidth markets motivates our study. We describe the economic framework for such a market. Examples demonstrate the problems in finite markets in which bandwidth trades in indivisible units. Competitive equilibria exist under the continuum model of perfect competition. We explore the countably inifinite economy as a model of perfect competition for such markets. Finally...

â â â  â  zahra zamani [1] â â  seyed komail tayebi â  department of economics, university of isfahan, iran â â department of economics, university of isfahan, iran â â â  abstract â  international trade causes that markets to become more competitive and small-medium sized enterprises (smes) learn to compete effectively within this increasingly competitive global market place. smes are able to ...