Do nonprofit hospitals sell at a discount compared to for-profit hospitals? This question stems from public concerns about the underpricing of nonprofits, and raises important questions about the nature of nonprofit firms, their objectives, and their managerial efficiency. We address this question using a database of hospital sales prices and find that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, nonpro...

Most competition authorities pursue a consumer standard – they seek to deliver an improvement in consumer surplus (i.e. the difference between what consumers are willing to pay and what they actually pay, aggregated across all consumers who purchase the good in question). Under this standard, if improving consumer surplus reduces profits, those lost profits are not taken into account. What do e...

This paper shows how idiosyncratic resources can be the basis of sustained profitability and persistent heterogeneity under competitive conditions: Generic inputs purchased in the market become idiosyncratic resources by investments in customization. Analytically, we show how heterogeneous firms co-exist in equilibrium. Computationally, we show that sustainable profits can emerge without “monop...

Many multi-product firms incur a complexity fixed cost when offering different product lines in different quality tiers relative to the case when offering all products lines in the same quality tier (high or low). Such fixed costs create an interdependency between firms’choices of quality tiers across different product lines, even when demands are independent. We investigate the effects of this...

A seller has an object for sale and can reach buyers only through intermediaries, who also have privileged information about buyers’ valuations. Intermediaries can either mediate the transaction by buying the object and reselling it–the merchant model– or refer buyers to the seller and release information for a fee–the agency model. The merchant model suffers from double marginalization and the...

Let G = (V, E) be a ring (or chain) network representing an optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network with k channels, where each edge e j has an integer capacity c j . A request {si , ti} is a pair of two nodes in G. Given m requests {si , ti}, i = 1, 2, . . . , m, each with a profit value pi , we would like to design/route a k-colorable set of paths for some (may not be all) of t...

Momentum profits are shown to be driven by the broad-market persistence of returns between the formation period and the holding period, which is measured as the slope coefficient of the regression of the cross-section returns in the holding period on the cross-section returns in the formation period. Broad-market persistence offers an understanding on momentum profits from a market-wide perspec...

We discuss the time evolution of quotation of stocks and commodities and show that quantum-like correction to the orthodox Bachelier model may be important. Our analysis shows that traders act as a sort of (quantum) tomograph and their strategies can be reproduced from the corresponding Wigner functions. The proposed interpretation of the chaotic movement of market prices imply that Orstein-Uhl...