The RAND Journal of Economics
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Wiley-Blackwell (US) |
| ISSN | 0741-6261 / 1756-2171 |
| Scopus | 23672 |
| Wikidata | Q3790226 |
| OpenAlex | S34139249 |
| MAG | 34139249 |
| Website | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17562171 |
| Total publications | 36 |
| Coverage period | 1984 - 2025 |
| Country | US |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 19 |
| Impact factor | 0.25 |
| SJR | 4.617 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 2.142 |
| CiteScore | 4.3 |
| h-index | 1 |
| i10-index | 1 |
| Overton policy citations | 3 |
| Female authorship share | 19.6% |
This journal is dedicated to economic theory and policy analysis, often employing quantitative methods. While economics is a social science, its focus is generally distant from the qualitative, ethnographic, and cultural concerns central to social anthropology
Economics and Econometrics · Auction Theory and Applications · Banking stability, regulation, efficiency · Capital Investment and Risk Analysis · Climate Change Policy and Economics · Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing · Corporate Finance and Governance · Digital Platforms and Economics · Economic and Environmental Valuation · Economic Growth and Productivity
Match Quality, Search, and the Internet Market for Used Books
This article examines effects of internet search technologies on match‐quality markets. A model in which sellers of unusual objects wait for high‐value buyers illustrates how more efficient search may simultaneously increase price levels, price dispersion, and social welfare. A reduced‐form analysis of the used‐book market finds support for several nuanced model predictions. Estimates from a novel structural framework indicate the shift to online…
Information Disclosure in Preemption Races: Blessing or (Winner's) Curse
Firms receiving independent signals on a common‐value risky project compete to be the first to invest. When firms are symmetric and competition is winner‐take‐all, rents are fully dissipated in equilibrium and the extent to which signals are publicly disclosed is irrelevant for welfare. When disclosure of signals is asymmetric, welfare is highest when firms are most asymmetric, and policies that uniformly promote disclosure may backfire, especial…
The curse of knowledge: Having access to customer information can reduce monopoly profits
We show that a monopolist's profit is higher if he refrains from collecting coarse information on his customers, sticking to constant uniform pricing rather than recognizing customers' segments through their purchase history. In the Markov perfect equilibrium with coarse information collection, after each commitment period, a new introductory price is offered to attract new customers, creating a new market segment for price discrimination. Eventu…
Extracting information or resource? The Hotelling rule revisited under asymmetric information
A concessionaire has private information on the initial stock of resource. A “virtual Hotelling rule” describes how the resource price evolves over time and how extraction costs are compounded with information costs along the optimal extraction path. Fields which are heterogeneous in terms of their initial stocks follow different extraction paths. Resource might be left unexploited in the long run as a way to foster incentives. The optimal contra…
Optimal student loans and graduate tax under moral hazard and adverse selection
We characterize the set of second‐best “menus” of student‐loan contracts in an economy with risky labor‐market outcomes, adverse selection, moral hazard, and risk aversion. We combine student loans with optimal income taxation. Second‐best optima provide incomplete insurance because of moral hazard. Optimal repayments must be income contingent, or the income tax must comprise a graduate tax. Individuals are ex ante unequal because of differing pr…
On Absolute Auctions and Secret Reserve Prices
From a theory viewpoint, the use of auctions with zero public reserve prices, also called absolute auctions, or of auctions with secret reserve prices, is somewhat puzzling despite being common. By allowing that buyers differ in their processing of past data regarding how the participation rate varies with the auction format and how reserve prices are distributed when secret, we show in a competitive environment that these auction formats may end…
China's land market auctions: Evidence of corruption?
In China, urban land is allocated by leasehold sales by local officials. Attempting to end widespread corruption, the government now requires sales to be conducted publicly, by either English or “two‐stage” auctions. However, corruption persists through the choice of auction format and preauction side deals between favored bidders and local officials. Two‐stage auctions have a first stage where favored developers signal that auctions are “taken,”…
“Upping the ante”: How to design efficient auctions with entry
Of primary importance in auction design is the set of strategies available to the seller at the auction stage. We first formalize hold‐up regarding entry costs that preys on second‐price auctions when the seller may engage in a costly shill‐bidding activity. We derive the optimal reserve and show how shill bidding can make posted prices outperforming auctions. Second, we advocate for a new regulation where shills would be banned but with the poss…
Optimal domestic regulation under asymmetric information and international trade: A simple general equilibrium approach
We investigate the design of domestic incentive regulations in a small economy opened to trade and its implications for international specialization and for trade openness to remain welfare‐improving. More specifically, we append to an otherwise standard 2 × 2 Heckscher‐Ohlin model of a small open economy a continuum of intermediate sectors producing nontradable goods used in tradable sectors. Those goods are produced by privately informed regula…
When does a firm disclose product information
A firm chooses a price and the product information it discloses to a consumer whose tastes are privately known. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition on the match function for full disclosure to be the unique equilibrium outcome whatever the costs and prior beliefs about product and consumer types. It allows for products with different qualities as well as some horizontal match heterogeneity. With independently distributed product and c…
How much discretion for risk regulators
We analyze the regulation of firms that undertake socially risky activities but can reduce the probability of an accident inflicted on third parties by carrying out non verifiable effort. Congress delegates regulation to an agency, although these two bodies may have different preferences toward the industry. The optimal level of discretion left to the agency results from the following trade‐off: the agency can tailor discretionary policies to its…
Exclusive contracts and demand foreclosure
A firm may induce some customers to sign exclusive contracts in order to deprive a rival of the minimum viable size, exclude it from the market, and enjoy increased market power. This strategy may result in socially inefficient exclusion even if the excluded firm is present at the contracting stage and can make counteroffers. In addition, allowing for breach penalty clauses decreases firms’ incentives to exclude rivals, because such clauses allow…
Incentives and creativity: Evidence from the academic life sciences
Despite its presumed role as an engine of economic growth, we know surprisingly little about the drivers of scientific creativity. We exploit key differences across funding streams within the academic life sciences to estimate the impact of incentives on the rate and direction of scientific exploration. Specifically, we study the careers of investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which tolerates early failure, rewards long‐te…
Sequential innovation, patents, and imitation
We argue that when innovation is “sequential” (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) and “complementary” (so that each potential innovator takes a different research line), patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static setting. Indeed, society and even inventors themselves may be better off without such protection. Furthermore, an inventor's prospective profit may actually…
Market participation in delegated and intrinsic common‐agency games
We study how competition in nonlinear pricing between two principals (sellers) affects market participation by a privately informed agent (consumer). When participation is restricted to all or nothing (“intrinsic” agency), the agent must choose between both principals' contracts and selecting her outside option. When the agent is afforded the additional possibilities of choosing only one contract (“delegated” agency), competition is more intense.…
Competition in two-sided markets
Many markets involve two groups of agents who interact via “platforms,“ where one group's benefit from joining a platform depends on the size of the other group that joins the platform. I present three models of such markets: a monopoly platform; a model of competing platforms where agents join a single platform; and a model of “competitive bottlenecks” where one group joins all platforms. The determinants of equilibrium prices are (i) the magnit…
Two-sided markets: A progress report
We provide a roadmap to the burgeoning literature on two-sided markets and present new results. We identify two-sided markets with markets in which the structure, and not only the level of prices charged by platforms, matters. The failure of the Coase theorem is necessary but not sufficient for two-sidedness. We build a model integrating usage and membership externalities that unifies two hitherto disparate strands of the literature emphasizing e…
Optimal state‐contingent regulation under limited liability
We consider an optimal regulation model in which the regulated firm's production cost is subject to random, publicly observable shocks. The distribution of these shocks is correlated with the firm's cost type, which is private information. The regulator designs an incentive‐compatible regulatory scheme, which adjusts itself automatically ex post given the realization of the cost shock. We derive the optimal scheme, assuming that there is an upper…
The Patent Paradox Revisited: An Empirical Study of Patenting in the U.S. Semiconductor Industry, 1979-1995
We examine the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation. Recent survey evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on patents to appropriate returns to R&D. Yet the propensity of semiconductor firms to patent has risen dramatically since the mid1980s. We explore this apparent paradox by conducting interviews with industry representatives and analyzing the p…
Assessing the Contribution of Venture Capital to Innovation
We examine the influence of venture capital on patented inventions in the United States across twenty industries over three decades. We address concerns about causality in several ways, including exploiting a 1979 policy shift that spurred venture capital fundraising. We find that increases in venture capital activity in an industry are associated with significantly higher patenting rates. While the ratio of venture capital to R&D averaged less t…
The Effects of Government-Industry R&D Programs on Private R&D: The Case of the Small Business Innovation Research Program
I ask whether government-industry commercial R&D grants increase private R&D. Regressing some measure of innovation on the subsidy can establish a correlation between grants and R&D, but it cannot determine whether grants increase firm R&D or whether firms that do more R&D received more grants. Using a dataset of firms involved in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, I estimate a multi-equation model to test these hypotheses. Fi…
Linear Probability Models of the Demand for Attributes with an Empirical Application to Estimating the Preferences of Legislators
This paper formulates and estimates a rigorously-justified linear probability model of binary choices over alternatives characterized by unobserved attributes. The model is applied to estimate preferences of congressmen as expressed in their votes on bills. The effective dimension of the attribute space characterizing votes is larger than what has been estimated in recent influential studies of voting by Poole and Rosenthal. Congressmen vote on m…
The Importance of Patent Scope: An Empirical Analysis
This article examines the impact of patent scope on firm value. I develop a proxy for patent scope based on the International Patent Classification scheme. Using a sample of 535 financing rounds at 173 privately held venture-backed biotechnology firms. I show that the breadth of patent protection significantly affects valuations. A one standard deviation increase in average patent scope is associated with a 21% increase in the firm's value. Broad…
Estimating Discrete-Choice Models of Product Differentiation
This article considers the problem of "supply-and-demand" analysis on a cross section of oligopoly markets with differentiated products. The primary methodology is to assume that demand can be described by a discrete-choice model and that prices are endogenously determined by price-setting firms. In contrast to some previous empirical work, the techniques explicitly allow for the possibility that prices are correlated with unobserved demand facto…
Politics and Social Costs: Estimating the Impact of Collective Action on Hazardous Waste Facilities
Firms that generate negative externalities may consider the effects of their location on the surrounding environment because of the right of their prospective neighbors to demand compensation for pollution and raise the transaction costs of location. Since communities vary both in the value individuals place on the environment and in the ability of residents to organize politically, locations that generate the least political opposition may not b…
Sequential innovation, patents, and imitation
We argue that when innovation is “sequential” (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) and “complementary” (so that each potential innovator takes a different research line), patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static setting. Indeed, society and even inventors themselves may be better off without such protection. Furthermore, an inventor's prospective profit may actually…
Politics and Social Costs: Estimating the Impact of Collective Action on Hazardous Waste Facilities
Firms that generate negative externalities may consider the effects of their location on the surrounding environment because of the right of their prospective neighbors to demand compensation for pollution and raise the transaction costs of location. Since communities vary both in the value individuals place on the environment and in the ability of residents to organize politically, locations that generate the least political opposition may not b…
The Importance of Patent Scope: An Empirical Analysis
This article examines the impact of patent scope on firm value. I develop a proxy for patent scope based on the International Patent Classification scheme. Using a sample of 535 financing rounds at 173 privately held venture-backed biotechnology firms. I show that the breadth of patent protection significantly affects valuations. A one standard deviation increase in average patent scope is associated with a 21% increase in the firm's value. Broad…
Estimating Discrete-Choice Models of Product Differentiation
This article considers the problem of "supply-and-demand" analysis on a cross section of oligopoly markets with differentiated products. The primary methodology is to assume that demand can be described by a discrete-choice model and that prices are endogenously determined by price-setting firms. In contrast to some previous empirical work, the techniques explicitly allow for the possibility that prices are correlated with unobserved demand facto…
Linear Probability Models of the Demand for Attributes with an Empirical Application to Estimating the Preferences of Legislators
This paper formulates and estimates a rigorously-justified linear probability model of binary choices over alternatives characterized by unobserved attributes. The model is applied to estimate preferences of congressmen as expressed in their votes on bills. The effective dimension of the attribute space characterizing votes is larger than what has been estimated in recent influential studies of voting by Poole and Rosenthal. Congressmen vote on m…
Assessing the Contribution of Venture Capital to Innovation
We examine the influence of venture capital on patented inventions in the United States across twenty industries over three decades. We address concerns about causality in several ways, including exploiting a 1979 policy shift that spurred venture capital fundraising. We find that increases in venture capital activity in an industry are associated with significantly higher patenting rates. While the ratio of venture capital to R&D averaged less t…
The Effects of Government-Industry R&D Programs on Private R&D: The Case of the Small Business Innovation Research Program
I ask whether government-industry commercial R&D grants increase private R&D. Regressing some measure of innovation on the subsidy can establish a correlation between grants and R&D, but it cannot determine whether grants increase firm R&D or whether firms that do more R&D received more grants. Using a dataset of firms involved in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, I estimate a multi-equation model to test these hypotheses. Fi…
The Patent Paradox Revisited: An Empirical Study of Patenting in the U.S. Semiconductor Industry, 1979-1995
We examine the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation. Recent survey evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on patents to appropriate returns to R&D. Yet the propensity of semiconductor firms to patent has risen dramatically since the mid1980s. We explore this apparent paradox by conducting interviews with industry representatives and analyzing the p…
Optimal state‐contingent regulation under limited liability
We consider an optimal regulation model in which the regulated firm's production cost is subject to random, publicly observable shocks. The distribution of these shocks is correlated with the firm's cost type, which is private information. The regulator designs an incentive‐compatible regulatory scheme, which adjusts itself automatically ex post given the realization of the cost shock. We derive the optimal scheme, assuming that there is an upper…
Competition in two-sided markets
Many markets involve two groups of agents who interact via “platforms,“ where one group's benefit from joining a platform depends on the size of the other group that joins the platform. I present three models of such markets: a monopoly platform; a model of competing platforms where agents join a single platform; and a model of “competitive bottlenecks” where one group joins all platforms. The determinants of equilibrium prices are (i) the magnit…
Two-sided markets: A progress report
We provide a roadmap to the burgeoning literature on two-sided markets and present new results. We identify two-sided markets with markets in which the structure, and not only the level of prices charged by platforms, matters. The failure of the Coase theorem is necessary but not sufficient for two-sidedness. We build a model integrating usage and membership externalities that unifies two hitherto disparate strands of the literature emphasizing e…
Market participation in delegated and intrinsic common‐agency games
We study how competition in nonlinear pricing between two principals (sellers) affects market participation by a privately informed agent (consumer). When participation is restricted to all or nothing (“intrinsic” agency), the agent must choose between both principals' contracts and selecting her outside option. When the agent is afforded the additional possibilities of choosing only one contract (“delegated” agency), competition is more intense.…
Sequential innovation, patents, and imitation
We argue that when innovation is “sequential” (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) and “complementary” (so that each potential innovator takes a different research line), patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static setting. Indeed, society and even inventors themselves may be better off without such protection. Furthermore, an inventor's prospective profit may actually…
Incentives and creativity: Evidence from the academic life sciences
Despite its presumed role as an engine of economic growth, we know surprisingly little about the drivers of scientific creativity. We exploit key differences across funding streams within the academic life sciences to estimate the impact of incentives on the rate and direction of scientific exploration. Specifically, we study the careers of investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which tolerates early failure, rewards long‐te…
Exclusive contracts and demand foreclosure
A firm may induce some customers to sign exclusive contracts in order to deprive a rival of the minimum viable size, exclude it from the market, and enjoy increased market power. This strategy may result in socially inefficient exclusion even if the excluded firm is present at the contracting stage and can make counteroffers. In addition, allowing for breach penalty clauses decreases firms’ incentives to exclude rivals, because such clauses allow…
How much discretion for risk regulators
We analyze the regulation of firms that undertake socially risky activities but can reduce the probability of an accident inflicted on third parties by carrying out non verifiable effort. Congress delegates regulation to an agency, although these two bodies may have different preferences toward the industry. The optimal level of discretion left to the agency results from the following trade‐off: the agency can tailor discretionary policies to its…
Optimal domestic regulation under asymmetric information and international trade: A simple general equilibrium approach
We investigate the design of domestic incentive regulations in a small economy opened to trade and its implications for international specialization and for trade openness to remain welfare‐improving. More specifically, we append to an otherwise standard 2 × 2 Heckscher‐Ohlin model of a small open economy a continuum of intermediate sectors producing nontradable goods used in tradable sectors. Those goods are produced by privately informed regula…
When does a firm disclose product information
A firm chooses a price and the product information it discloses to a consumer whose tastes are privately known. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition on the match function for full disclosure to be the unique equilibrium outcome whatever the costs and prior beliefs about product and consumer types. It allows for products with different qualities as well as some horizontal match heterogeneity. With independently distributed product and c…
“Upping the ante”: How to design efficient auctions with entry
Of primary importance in auction design is the set of strategies available to the seller at the auction stage. We first formalize hold‐up regarding entry costs that preys on second‐price auctions when the seller may engage in a costly shill‐bidding activity. We derive the optimal reserve and show how shill bidding can make posted prices outperforming auctions. Second, we advocate for a new regulation where shills would be banned but with the poss…
China's land market auctions: Evidence of corruption?
In China, urban land is allocated by leasehold sales by local officials. Attempting to end widespread corruption, the government now requires sales to be conducted publicly, by either English or “two‐stage” auctions. However, corruption persists through the choice of auction format and preauction side deals between favored bidders and local officials. Two‐stage auctions have a first stage where favored developers signal that auctions are “taken,”…
On Absolute Auctions and Secret Reserve Prices
From a theory viewpoint, the use of auctions with zero public reserve prices, also called absolute auctions, or of auctions with secret reserve prices, is somewhat puzzling despite being common. By allowing that buyers differ in their processing of past data regarding how the participation rate varies with the auction format and how reserve prices are distributed when secret, we show in a competitive environment that these auction formats may end…
Optimal student loans and graduate tax under moral hazard and adverse selection
We characterize the set of second‐best “menus” of student‐loan contracts in an economy with risky labor‐market outcomes, adverse selection, moral hazard, and risk aversion. We combine student loans with optimal income taxation. Second‐best optima provide incomplete insurance because of moral hazard. Optimal repayments must be income contingent, or the income tax must comprise a graduate tax. Individuals are ex ante unequal because of differing pr…
Extracting information or resource? The Hotelling rule revisited under asymmetric information
A concessionaire has private information on the initial stock of resource. A “virtual Hotelling rule” describes how the resource price evolves over time and how extraction costs are compounded with information costs along the optimal extraction path. Fields which are heterogeneous in terms of their initial stocks follow different extraction paths. Resource might be left unexploited in the long run as a way to foster incentives. The optimal contra…
The curse of knowledge: Having access to customer information can reduce monopoly profits
We show that a monopolist's profit is higher if he refrains from collecting coarse information on his customers, sticking to constant uniform pricing rather than recognizing customers' segments through their purchase history. In the Markov perfect equilibrium with coarse information collection, after each commitment period, a new introductory price is offered to attract new customers, creating a new market segment for price discrimination. Eventu…
Information Disclosure in Preemption Races: Blessing or (Winner's) Curse
Firms receiving independent signals on a common‐value risky project compete to be the first to invest. When firms are symmetric and competition is winner‐take‐all, rents are fully dissipated in equilibrium and the extent to which signals are publicly disclosed is irrelevant for welfare. When disclosure of signals is asymmetric, welfare is highest when firms are most asymmetric, and policies that uniformly promote disclosure may backfire, especial…
Match Quality, Search, and the Internet Market for Used Books
This article examines effects of internet search technologies on match‐quality markets. A model in which sellers of unusual objects wait for high‐value buyers illustrates how more efficient search may simultaneously increase price levels, price dispersion, and social welfare. A reduced‐form analysis of the used‐book market finds support for several nuanced model predictions. Estimates from a novel structural framework indicate the shift to online…