In our first two columns, we described innovative practices that Advanced Practices Council (APC) members shared with their colleagues at recent meetings. In this column, we describe the ideas that Jim Tosone, a long-standing APC member, shared at the October APC meeting. A contributor to the recently published “Complete Idiot’s Guide to the U.S. Constitution,” Tosone explained how understandin...

For approximately the last forty years industrial organization economists have undertaken empirical studies to determine if an increase in the number of producers results in more competitive market outcomes. In recent years a number of empirical studies, many under the inspiration and guidance of Leonard Weiss, have focused directly on the relationship between the price of output in a market an...

The literature on strategic alliances is vast. Most authors are pro-alliances and the casual reader may thereby be lulled into a false sense of security concerning the advantages of strategic alliances. There are several possible advantages of strategic alliances however by joining an alliance several opportunities are also forsaken. The opposite strategic option, a "go it alone strategy" gener...

nterest in commodity prices as indicators of consumer price inflation has ebbed and flowed with the rise and fall in commodity prices themselves. True to form, as commodity prices have surged in the last two years (Chart 1), interest in their predictive power has returned. Inflation hawks point to an outpouring of studies in the late 1980s showing a strong empirical connection between commodity...

Price transmission through global–domestic agricultural supply chains is a fundamental indicator of domestic market efficiency and producer welfare. Conventional price-transmission econometrics test for theory-based spatial-arbitrage restriction that long-run equilibrium prices in spatially distinct markets differ by no more than transaction costs. The conventional approach ill-equipped to pric...

BACKGROUND This study aims at understanding the mechanisms underlying the dramatic decline of the retail prices of major drugs like cocaine and heroin during the past two decades. It also aims at analysing the implications of this decline for drug policies. METHODS We use a theoretical model to identify the possible causes of this price decline. This allows us to formulate the hypothesis that...

This paper develops a small open economy, sticky-price model that determines a unique, stable long-run asset position for households as function of their incentive to anticipate or postpone consumption and labor effort across periods. This is accomplished by adopting an overlapping-generations structure in which new households with no assets enter the economy in each period. The same characteri...

We study the performance of a stylized supply chain where two firms, a retailer and a producer, compete in a Stackelberg game. The retailer purchases a single product from the producer and afterward sells it in the retail market at a stochastic clearance price. The retailer, however, is budget constrained and is therefore limited in the number of units that he may purchase from the producer. We...

Ethical consumerism is a growing trend worldwide. Ethical consumers' expectations are increasing and neither the Fairtrade nor the organic farming concept covers all the ethical concerns of consumers. Against this background the aim of this research is to elicit consumers' preferences regarding organic food with additional ethical attributes and their relevance at the market place. A mixed meth...

Abstract Smallholder agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is largely exposed to pervasive market failures, translating into missed opportunities and sub-optimal economic behavior. These failures can partly be traced the importance of economies scale procuring inputs marketing produce, where smallholders face disproportionately high transaction costs. Producer organizations could help lessen costs;...