Bacteria produce a wide variety of exoproducts that favourably modify their environment and increase their fitness. These are often termed 'public goods' because they are costly for individuals to produce and can be exploited by non-producers (cheats). The outcome of conflict over public goods is dependent upon the prevailing environment and the phenotype of the individuals in competition. Many...

A Working Paper is the author's intellectual property. It is intended as a means to promote research to interested readers. Its content should not be copied or hosted on any server without written permission from [email protected] Find more INSEAD papers at We analyze two pricing mechanisms for information goods – selling, where an up-front payment allows unrestricted use by the consum...

F sales forecasts for retailers can be improved if we incorporate cost of goods sold, inventory, and gross margin (defined by us as the ratio of sales to cost of goods sold) as three endogenous variables. We construct a simultaneous equations model, estimated using public financial and nonfinancial data, to provide joint forecasts of annual cost of goods sold, inventory, and gross margin for re...

a r t i c l e i n f o This article provides a practical, applied analysis of optimal targeting in agricultural land preservation, comparing the performance of four alternative targeting strategies. Nonmarket benefit data and hedonic cost estimates are used for parcels in Sussex County, Delaware. The results show that branch-and-bound optimization (OPT) does not significantly outperform the much...

The evaluation of public expenditures is a central concern of development economics-and a concern highlighted by the increasingly stringent budget constraints in both developing and developed countries. This task has also become increasingly difficult as governments have moved their focus away from providing private, tradable, goods towards public goods that are provided either without charge, ...

Two of the main puzzles in international economics are the consumption and the portfolio home biases. They are empirically related: countries that are more open to trade also have more internationally diversified portfolios. In a two-country stochastic equilibrium model, I prove that introducing trade costs in goods market alone, as suggested by Obstfeld and Rogoff [2000], is not sufficient to ...