Economics at the FTC: Non-price Merger Effects and Deceptive Automobile Ads

Economists at the Federal Trade Commission analyze a wide range of activities, practices, and policies in support of the agency’s consumer protection and competition missions as demonstrated by the two economic analyses discussed in this article. The first section of this article describes the economic analysis of a proposed merger’s impact on non-price dimensions of competition in the daily fantasy sports market. The second section builds an economic model to quantify the harm to consumers from deceptive advertising in automobile markets.     

Dynamic panel data estimation of an integrated Grossman and Becker–Murphy model of health and addiction

We propose a dynamic panel data approach to estimate a model that integrates the Becker–Murphy theory of rational addiction with the Grossman model o     

Rejoinder : Food, agricultural and trade policy to the year 2000

This article, partly in response to Fred Sanderson's article (pp 363–73), challenges the narrow approach of forecasting the future food situation by extrapolating current trends, and the view that little can be done to improve the predicament of the ‘poorest of the poor’. This article argues that we must look for ways of breaking out of the vicious circle of low income, low economic demand, low productivity and low levels of resource utilization.     

Unemployment insurance and involuntary unemployment: The case of adverse selection

This paper studies the private and public provision of unemployment insurance in a model where equilibrium unemployment results from the use of the wage as a worker selection device. It is shown that private provision will not occur, essentially because those workers most desired by a firm place least value on such coverage. Respecting the same informational constraints, public provision necessarily gives rise to some distortions in participation decisions, but nonetheless is welfare improving in the aggregate.     

Establishing the determinants of internal reputation: the case of R&D scientists

This paper discusses the factors which determine the human resource reputations of science-based organisations. Reputation, in this context, refers to the extent to which scientists regard the department in which they work as a good employer, and implicitly, a good place to practise science. As a consequence, this study is concerned with internal rather than external reputation. The R&D departments of ten science-based organisations employing approximately 1500 scientists were included in the study. The sample of 402 respondents was representative, in terms of age, sex, qualifications and experience, of the population of scientists in the organizations included in the research. All employees were educated to at least the level of a Bachelor of Science degree (BSc) and in many cases had obtained a higher degree, Master of Science (7.0%), or Doctor of Philosophy (35.6%). The perceptions of employees are reported; it was beyond the scope of the research to examine the managerial views on reputation.