How competition affects schools' performances: Does specification matter?

If the number of individuals is odd, majority rule is the only non-dictatorial strategy-proof social choice rule on the domain of linear orders that admit a Condorcet winner (Campbell and Kelly, 2003). This paper shows that the claim is false when the number of individuals is even, and provides a counterpart to the theorem for the even case.     

Design Inertia: Designing for Life‐Cycle Flexibility in Internet‐Based Services*

Managing innovation in rapidly moving environments, such as Internet‐based services, is a major challenge in theory and in practice. Most of the existing literature focuses on the development process as the main area in which innovation takes place. However, in environments where the pace of change of technology and market needs is extremely high, managing service innovations means not only being able to design a good service but also, more importantly, continuously redesigning and adapting the service in order to deal with frequent exogenous changes and opportunities. A high number of innovations therefore must be introduced throughout the entire life cycle of a service. This capability of introducing incremental and radical innovations during the service life cycle (i.e., to adapt a service to contextual changes and opportunities after it has been first released onto the market) at low costs and in the shortest possible time is what is defined here as service life‐cycle flexibility. This process of service adaptation and upgrading implies significant challenges that can be traced back to when a service is first conceived and designed. In fact, many decisions made during the first design process (i.e., the choice of a given database environment) involve a low reversibility rate and may reduce the possibility of taking advantage of future unpredictable opportunities, creating what is called inertia toward innovation. In other words, service life‐cycle flexibility largely depends on how a service has been first designed. This article analyzes two in‐depth case studies of Italian online newspapers and identifies five possible inertia factors that may influence service life‐cycle flexibility, namely (1) technological inertia; (2) internal organizational inertia; (3) external organizational inertia; (4) customer inertia toward changes in the service package; and (5) customer inertia toward changes in the service interaction design. These inertia factors are traced back to the service development process in order to suggest design practices that may increase the service life‐cycle flexibility.     

The effects of unification: markets,policy, and cyclical convergence in Italy, 1861–1913

This paper uses time-series evidence on construction movements to examine the convergence of regional business cycles in the decades that followed Italy’s unification. The aggregate series point to cyclical convergence, but a sector-level analysis traces this result to the decline in differentiated “regional-policy” shocks. The regional market cycles diverged, as regions specialized in different sectors of production; market-cycle convergence is observed only within the “industrial triangle,” the regions of which also developed different specializations. This suggests that the balance between growing interdependence and growing differentiation is not general, as the current literature presumes, but specialization-specific.     

Competition in Communication Networks: Pricing and Regulation

By any measure, the communication sector is important. It isno surprise, then, that the communication sector has attractedthe attention of both policy-makers and economists. In thispaper, we argue that four characteristics of the networks thatdeliver communication services make this area of particularinterest. We analyse the implications of networks' cost structures;the strong complementarity between their components; the demand-sideexternalities that arise from consumption of their services;and the social obligations attached to them. Despite the attentionthat the communication sector has received, many aspects ofcompetition between networks are still poorly understood. Weidentify some of the key issues that will continue to troubleregulators and interest academics.     

Price discrimination and price dispersion in a duopoly

This paper analyses the problem of price discrimination in a market where consumers have heterogeneous preferences both over a horizontal parameter (brand) and a vertical one (quality). Discriminatory contracts are characterized for different market structures. It is shown that price dispersion, i.e. the observed range of prices for each class of customers, increases almost everywhere as competition is introduced in the market.