This study investigates the relationship between consumer search costs, inflation, and firm markups in retail trade by employing actual measures of consumer search cost gathered by way of an online consumer survey. Consistent with theory, results indicate that markups can be higher if consumer search costs are higher. Results from panel data also show that increases in inflation lead to increas...

We determine how the U.S. ethanol tax credit and import tariff affect the corn-ethanol-gasoline markets and how farm subsidies interact with these policies. We show how the ethanol tax credit and import tariff each uniquely affect the ethanol and gasoline prices. The ethanol import tariff alone increases the terms of trade in ethanol imports and corn exports, but decreases the terms of trade in...

Taiwan is at the top of the list among Asian countries when it comes to the number of female legislators in national parliament. However, whether the increasing level of female politicians has an effect on policy outcomes is unclear. This is because female politicians’ work on women’s issues is often restricted by party discipline with the flourishing development of political parties and the po...

We consider revenue division problems in iterative settings. In our model, a group of players has some initial resources, used in order to generate revenue. At every time-step, the revenue shares received at time t are player resources at time t + 1, and the game is repeated. The key issue here is that the way resources are shared has a dramatic effect on long-term social welfare, so in order t...

This paper investigates the effect of different patent regimes on R&D investment and social welfare in a duopoly market with uncertain R&D process. We find that strong patent protection increases R&D investment of at least one firm but whether both firms’ R&D investment will be more under strong patent protection is ambiguous. While ex-ante welfare is more likely to be higher under strong paten...

Economic interest in innovation policy largely arises from the fundamental importance of innovation to social welfare and from inefficiencies in innovation in a competitive market environment. As a result, a wide variety of public innovation policies are used in practice. This study reviews the economic justifications for public innovation policies and compares the existing policy tools, paying...

BACKGROUND The trade-off that society is willing to make to promote a more equitable distribution of health can be represented as a social welfare function (SWF). SWFs are an economic construct that can be used to illustrate concerns for total health with aversion to inequalities between socioeconomic groups. OBJECTIVE This study used people's preferences to estimate the shapes of health-rela...

This paper focuses on the relationships between observed processes of post-acquisition activities within four cross-border horizontal acquisitions that occurred in the telecommunications equipment manufacturing sector between 1988 and 1992. We discuss the desirability of such acquisitions from a corporate and social welfare standpoint. We report a detailed survey of the context, post-acquisitio...

This note develops a simple model to illustrate formally why ungoverned spaces are an economic puzzle. It would be surprising for a social welfare maximizing government to leave space ungoverned (i.e., with no local public good provision) because we think of public goods as efficient. Yet if public goods are efficient enough for a responsive government to provide them, even a kleptocrat would p...

The Internet world as we know it today has undergone far-reaching changes since its early days while becoming a critical communications underpinning our economic performance and social welfare. The 3D Internet is poised to replace the 2D Internet as we know it today. This paper takes a look at the two types of Internet, advantages and disadvantages and the future of the present Internet as we k...