We rely on economic theory to discuss how blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies will influence the rate and direction of innovation. We identify two key costs that are affected by distributed ledger technology: 1) the cost of verification; and 2) the cost of networking. Markets facilitate the voluntary exchange of goods and services between buyers and sellers. For an exchange to be execute...

We study electronic bidding and contracting for nonstorable goods such as electric power using multi-GA agents and game theoretical approaches. In this framework, there is a long-term contract market as well as a back-stop spot market. Seller agents bid into an electronic bulletin board their contract offers in terms of price or capacity, while Buyer agents decide how much to contract with Sell...

Survey evidence suggests that consumers care about the environment and are willing to pay a higher price for a product that generates less environmental harm. We induce buyer preferences over quality in a laboratory posted offer market to study sellers’ incentives to offer products of differing quality. Buyers are unaware of the product quality before purchase, as is often the case for goods wi...

This article studies the use of different distribution channels as an instrument of price discrimination in credence goods markets. In credence goods markets, where consumers do not know which quality of the good or service they need, price discrimination proceeds along the dimension of quality of advice offered. High quality advice and appropriate treatment is provided to the most profitable m...

People typically demand more to relinquish the goods they own than they would be willing to pay to acquire those goods if they did not already own them (the endowment effect). The standard economic explanation of this phenomenon is that people expect the pain of relinquishing a good to be greater than the pleasure of acquiring it (the loss aversion account). The standard psychological explanati...

Many markets for homogeneous goods feature market power and heterogeneity in the prices paid by buyers. Search costs are a common explanation for this phenomenon and are a concern as they generate inefficiencies. In this paper, I study a competitive market for homogeneous goods and, by exploiting a unique dataset, I find three facts that are opposite to what one would expect from a market with ...

Honesty is a fundamental pillar for cooperation in human societies and thus for their economic welfare. However, humans do not always act in an honest way. Here, we examine how insurance coverage affects the degree of honesty in credence goods markets. Such markets are plagued by strong incentives for fraudulent behavior of sellers, resulting in estimated annual costs of billions of dollars to ...

Internet auction sites have evolved into markets where commodity goods such as electronics or DVDs are traded. Often several auctions for very similar (if not identical) items run simultaneously, and unit-demand bidders must adopt global multi-auction bidding strategies. Despite the increasing practical importance of such markets, there is relatively little theory on how unit-demand bidders sho...

Firms spend a half-trillion dollars advertising each year. To model and examine the welfare effects of with heterogeneous goods Grossman Shapiro (1984) informative in monopolistic competition find that is socially excessive for large numbers sellers. However, it has been noted their equilibrium may not exist. We present tractable replacing standard assumption finite number firms continuum firms...

Since the proposal for the six object-oriented metrics by CK (Chidamber and Kemerer) [8], several studies have been conducted to validate their metrics and discovered some deficiencies. Consequently, many new metrics for object-oriented systems have been proposed. Among the various measurements of object-oriented characteristics, we focus on the metrics of class inheritance hierarchies in desig...