We investigate how costly acquisition and exchange of customer-specific information affects industry profit and consumer welfare. Consumers differ in their preferences for competing brands and in their switching costs between brands. Brand-producing firms use their acquired knowledge of customer-specific preferences to differentiate prices. We show that consumers are worse off when firms acquir...

In the paper we study parallel key exchange among multiple parties. The status of parallel key exchange can be depicted by a key graph. In a key graph, a vertex represents a party and an edge represents a relation of two parties who are to share a key. We first propose a security model for a key graph, which extends the Bellare-Rogaway model for two-party key exchange. Next, we clarify the rela...

This paper reports a study on the socio-economic determinants of completed fertility in Mexico. An innovative Poisson Double-Hurdle count model is developed for the analysis. This methodological approach allows low and high order parities to be determined by two different data generating mechanisms, and explicitly accounts for potential endogenous switching between regimes. Unobserved heterogen...