A growing number of scholars argues that we are witnessing a resurgenceof religion in world politics, accompanied by an increasein religiously inspired conflict. Empirical studies demonstrate thatreligious conflicts more violent, intense, durable, andmore difficult to resolve through negotiated settlements than theirsecular counterparts. In this paper, argue these conclusionsare unreliable, bec...

In this paper we examine the influence that indirect network effects have on a durable goods manufacturer’s distribution strategy to lease or sell her product. Previous research has identified that a durable goods manufacturer can mitigate the potential for its own opportunistic behavior with respect to consumers by leasing instead of selling its product. However, we show that leasing creates a...

M durable products cannot be used without a contingent consumable product, e.g., printers require ink, iPods require songs, razors require blades, etc. For such products, manufacturers may be able to lock in consumers by making their products incompatible with consumables that are produced by other firms. We examine the effectiveness of such a strategy in the presence of strategic consumers who...

Durables such as cars or houses are a substantial component in the balance sheets of households. These durables are exposed to risk and can be insured in the market. We build a dynamic model in which the agent decides jointly about the size of the durable stock, the stock of a risk-free asset and insurance. This allows us to understand the importance of three di¤erent ways to cope with the risk...

– The large popularity of web services and applications makes their performance very critical. Reducing the latency of retrieve web pages has become a real challenge. Caching is widely used for this purpose. Web caching is a well-known strategy for improving performance of Web-based system by keeping web objects that are likely to be used in the near future close to the client. Most of the curr...

This paper investigates the efficiency of innovation investment in durable goods monopoly under a threat of entry. It is well known that the durability causes time inconsistency to the durable goods monopolist, which in turn provides a competitive pressure. When entry threat exists, the durability of the product endows the monopolist with the power to deter entry since the current sales alter t...

How big are government spending multipliers? A recent litererature has argued that while government spending multipliers may be small on average, they might be much larger during recessions when there is greater economic slack. However, this simple intuition ignores the significant heterogeneity of spending captured in aggregate GDP. Even if aggregate GDP responds more to fiscal shocks during r...