Until its sales of a product materialize, a firm is a “pre-producer” in the market for that product. That firm may may be a new start-up, or it may already sell other products. Firms that do not succeed in generating sales eventually become discouraged and move on to other activities. When this fate befalls a lot of firms, as it recently did in several IT-related businesses, the indistry experi...

It is well known that in linear programming, the optimal values of the dual variables can be interpreted as shadow prices (marginal values) of the right-hand-side coefficients. However, this is true only under nondegeneracy assumptions. Since real problems are often degenerate, the output from conventional LP software regarding such marginal information can be misleading. This paper surveys and...

AIMS To review empirical research that seeks to relate marginal increases in enforcement against the supply of illicit drugs to changes in drug prices at the level of the drug supply system being targeted. METHOD Review of empirical studies. FINDINGS Although the fact of prohibition itself raises prices far above those likely to pertain in legal markets, there is little evidence that raisin...

A shadow price is a process S̃ lying within the bid/ask prices S, S of a market with proportional transaction costs, such that maximizing expected utility from consumption in the frictionless market with price process S̃ leads to the same maximal utility as in the original market with transaction costs. For finite probability spaces, this note provides an elementary proof for the existence of suc...

Motivated by applications to bond markets, we propose a multivariate framework for discrete time financial markets with proportional transaction costs and a countable infinite number of tradable assets. We show that the no-arbitrage of second kind property (NA2 in short), introduced by [17] for finite dimensional markets, allows to provide a closure property for the set of attainable claims in ...

The dramatic increase in the price of rice and other commodities over the past year has generated new interest in how these markets work and how they can be improved. This paper uses an exceptionally rich data set to test the extent to which markets in Madagascar are integrated across space at different scales of analysis and to explain some of the factors that limit spatial arbitrage and price...

Ticket markets raise a large variety of pricing questions that are of substantial interest for theoretical economists. They also offer a unique laboratory experiment for empiricists because they exhibit rich sources of price variations. Prices vary because seats are different, because seats are located in different places, because performances take place on different dates, because venues offer...

This research project focused on factors influencing consumers’ purchasing behavior. Specifically, the project focused on sustainability of packaging and attempted to find if sustainability of a package (represented by post-consumer content) affected a consumer’s decision to buy that product. The specific question asked was: “Are consumers willing to purchase a product based on the environmenta...

58. Sustainable development goes beyond a static framework of correcting environmental externalities , deficient markets and inadequate property rights. It is very much concerned with the availability of environmental and natural resources in the future. The problem may be particularly acute in developing countries that have high discount rates due to the scarcity of capital and prevalence of p...

This paper studies maximin paths in the context of a standard exhaustible resource model. Under the assumption that the resource is important in production, it establishes the efficiency and uniqueness of non-trivial maximin paths. It uses these results to study the nature of the maximin value and policy functions. The value function is shown to be differentiable with respect to the initial res...