The Role of Contract in Quality Assurance

In recent years a debate has raged about the accuracy of the cost-of-living index. A major bone of contention regards capturing the changes in the quality of goods. Were it easy to measure quality, disputes about the magnitude of the change would have not arisen. The difficulty in pinpointing quality is not merely an academic or policy question; it also poses a major problem for exchange. When the quality of the exchanged commodities is uncertain, costly disputes about what one gives and the other receives are bound to arise. Such disputes are a matter of property rights, of who owns what.Contracts and Vertical Integration, Agricultural and Food Policy,

罗纳德·科斯:社会成本的性质是研究企业问题的关键

三十年前,《社会成本问题》[1960]的发表,改变了产业组织领域,更扩展了该领域的范围。1本文简要评述了1960年以前该领域的状况,然后从几方面阐释了科斯论文如何改变了经济学思考的方式。早期发展交易成本总是以这种或那种方式在经济学中扮演重要角色:经济学家早就意识到,在专业化分工的经济中,将生产要素转换成效用并不仅仅是制造和运输。他们也意识到市场交换会受制于一些“摩擦“,即“做生意产生的成本“是正的,并且这

LeChatelier-Samuelson Principle in Games and Pass-Through of Shocks

The LeChatelier-Samuelson principle ("the principle") states that as a reaction to a shock, an agent's short-run adjustment of an action is smaller than the long-run adjustment of that action when the other related actions can also be adjusted. We extend the principle to strategic environments and to shocks that affect more than one action directly. We define long run as an adjustment that also includes the affected player adjusting its other actions and other players adjusting their strategies. We show that the principle holds for 1) supermodular games (strategic complements), 2) submodular games (strategic substitutes) for shocks that affect only one player's action directly and when the players' payoffs depend only on their own strategies and the sum of the rivals' strategies (for example, homogeneous Cournot oligopoly). We also provide other sufficient conditions for the principle to hold in games of strategic substitutes. Our results imply that when the principle holds a multiproduct oligopoly might have lower cost pass-through in the short run than in the long run. Hence, we argue that the principle might explain the empirical findings of overshifting of cost and unit tax by multiproduct firms

Values and Norms Matter - On the Basic Determinants of Long-Run Economic Development

Over the last couple of decades, it has become a commonplace to claim that institutions matter for economic development. Yet, institutions are not exogenous but the result of hu-man action. It is argued here that the values and norms held by substantial parts of society’s members are an important determinant of its institutions. It is further argued that values and norms have both a direct and an indirect effect on economic development: the direct effect materializes because the values and norms also contain the work ethic which, if transformed into behavior, should have direct consequences on economic development. The indirect effect is conjectured to work via the relevant institutions: if institutions are important for economic development and institutions are influenced by the values and norms, then this is a more indi-rect channel through which values and norms can display their impact