Based on the recent trade models of the Heterogeneous Firms Trade (HFT) model and the Quality Heterogeneous Firms Trade (QHFT) model, we classify export goods (at the HS 6-digit level of disaggregation) by quality and price competition. We find a high proportions of quality-competition goods for the major EU countries and lower proportions for Canada, Australia and China. However, the overlap o...

Eric See-To Department of Management Science Lancaster University Management School Open source software (OSS) is now posing significant competition to proprietary or closed source software (CSS) in several software markets. In this paper, we characterize the response of a firm developing CSS to the presence of an OSS in its market. In particular, we look at the firm's choice of resource invest...

T paper studies the effect of online product reviews on different players in a channel structure. We consider a retailer selling two substitutable products produced by different manufacturers, and the products differ in both their qualities and fits to consumers’ needs. Online product reviews provide additional information for consumers to mitigate the uncertainty about the quality of a product...

Background Transparency in quality of care is an increasingly important issue in healthcare. In many international healthcare systems, transparency in quality is crucial for health insurers when purchasing care on behalf of their consumers, for providers to improve the quality of care (if necessary), and for consumers to choose their provider in case treatment is needed. Conscious consume...

Background. Considering that a person's physical and psychological possibilities are not limitless, the technical means used by athletes are of great importance. In order to achieve high results in the kayak sprint competition, users-athletes orient to the highest quality products; therefore, a significant task falls to their manufacturers to analyze the competitors' products, evaluate users' n...