Research Fellow of       

On-Going Research

Iceberg transport technologies in spatial competition. Hotelling reborn (joint with J.M. Usategui)
Transport costs in address models of differentiation are usually modeled as separable of the consumption commodity and with a parametric price. However, there are many sectors in an economy where such modeling is not satisfactory either because transportation is supplied under oligopolistic conditions or because there is a difference (loss) between the amount delivered at the point of production and the amount received at the point of consumption. This paper is a first attempt to tackle these issues proposing to study competition in spatial models using an iceberg-like transport cost technology allowing for concave and convex melting functions.

Partnerships in pre-competitive agreements (joint with R. Nicolini)

This paper proposes a novel argument to study the importance of the right matching between firm's technological endowments in determining the profitability of pre-competitive agreements. Our distinguishing feature is to introduce a time dimension for those agreements by modeling a technology diffusion process. In such a way, we depict a close connection between firms' technology and the possibility to achieve a positive outcome from creating an agreement. Moreover, as far as the diffusion process is modeled as an iterative process, a suitable set of initial technological conditions is the basic factor leading to successful agreements. The probability of identifying a suitable partner to close an agreement wit is decreasing in its length.

Technological adoption in health care (joint with P.P. Barros)

This paper addresses the impact of payment systems on the rate of technology adoption. We present a model where technological shift is driven by demand uncertainty, increased patients' benefit, financial variables, and the reimbursement system to providers.  Two payment systems are studied: cost reimbursement and (two variants of) DRG. According to the system considered, adoption occurs either when patients' benefits are large enough or when the differential reimbursement across technologies offsets the cost of adoption. Cost  reimbursement leads to higher adoption of the new technology if the rate of reimbursement is high relative to the margin of new vs. old technology reimbursement under DRG. Having larger patient benefits favors more adoption under the cost reimbursement payment system, provided that adoption occurs initially under both payment systems.

Two sided markets in health care provision (joint with M.P. Espinosa)

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Last update, November 2009