Recently added articles from RAND Journal of Economics:
Efficiency out of disorder: contested ownership in incomplete contracts.
Dec 22, 2009; ... 1. Introduction * Common wisdom suggests that players can avoid costly (legal) ownership disputes over assets by clearly assigning ownership beforehand. Yet, in many economic applications players fail to do so. An important example of this situation is when players agree to ...
Sequential innovation, patents, and imitation.
Dec 22, 2009; ... 1. Introduction * The standard economic rationale for patents is to protect inventors from imitation and thereby give them the incentive to incur the cost of innovation. Conventional wisdom holds that, unless would-be competitors are restrained from imitating an invention, the ...
Credible discovery, settlement, and negative expected value suits.
Dec 22, 2009; ... I. Introduction * Asymmetric information has been the leading explanation of why pretrial bargaining does not always result in Pareto superior settlements rather than in costly litigation since Bebchuk (1984), Reinganum and Wilde (1986), and Nalebuff (1987). Asymmetric ...
Market power, price discrimination, and allocative efficiency in intermediate-goods markets.
Dec 22, 2009; ... 1. Introduction * A key insight from the literature on price discrimination in final-goods markets is that a firm optimally charges a higher price to buyers whose demand is less elastic. This insight has also been applied to firms that sell in intermediate-goods markets. There, ...
Rockets and feathers: understanding asymmetric pricing.
Dec 22, 2009; ... 1. Introduction * Output prices do not react symmetrically to changes in input prices. According to Peltzman's comprehensive study of 165 producer goods and 77 consumer goods, "In two out of three markets, output prices rise faster than they fall" (Peltzman, 2000; p. 480). This ...