We analyze clients’ contract choices in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for standard cases such as labor disputes for individuals and collecting debts for businesses. In the auctions, lawyers can submit bids with any fee arrangement they prefer, including an hourly rate, a fixed fee, and a ‘mixed fee’: a time-capped fixed fee plus an hourly rate for any additional hours should the case take ...
It is striking that economists in particular firmly believe in the benefits of rule-binding, even though this belief runs counter to the standard assumption of economic theory that we humans are self-interested and therefore extremely resourceful when it comes to circumventing inconvenient government regulations, e.g. taxes. In Public Choice Theory, politicians are even assumed to have nothing but ...
We examine how competition affects VAT pass-through in isolated oligopolistic markets as defined by the Greek islands. Using daily gasoline prices and a difference-in-differences methodology, we study how changes in VAT rates are passed through to consumers in islands with different number of retailers. We show that pass-through increases with competition, going from 50% in monopoly to around 80%...
In August 2022, the US Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a comprehensive piece of legislation aiming to stimulate the US economy and to increase its resilience. At an estimated 430 billion euros, it is a massive government investment and spending program in the welfare state, federal infrastructure, climate action, and environmental protection. At the same time, the IRA is intended ...
We study the role of alliance governance in the behavior of partners in alliances with different degrees of competition. Using data from a lab experiment on 1,009 alliances and 31,662 partners' choices, we explore whether and how alliances succeed in different competitive scenarios, contingent on the use of formal governance mechanisms (termination clauses) and the number of partners in the alliance. ...