In applications as diverse as banking, supermarket and catalogue sales, it has been clearly identified that prices have a strong propensity to cluster around certain digits. This study forwards an explanation and empirical investigation of price clustering in retail markets, through an...

The structure of conglomerates embedded in the strong vertical ownership network in East Asia was believed to be a driving force for the economic success but was also blamed for the recent financial crisis in Asia given the fallacy - too big to collapse. This paper introduces a notion of...

This paper develops a signalling model to look at some effects of the inclusion of an efficiency defence in merger regulation. By incorporating Type I and Type II errors into the antitrust agency's pay-off function approval probabilities are endogenised. The agency can choose to use a fuzzy...

This paper investigates competition between chain-stores and independents in the UK opticians' industry, using the relationship between the number of outlets present in a local market and the market size. Chain-stores are shown to have a significant effect on local market competition. In...

The 'two-thirds rule' stands as a caveat to the quantitative jurisdictional thresholds stipulated in the Merger Regulations. It prevents the attribution of a 'Community dimension' to large business mergers where two-thirds of the parties' respective turnovers are made in one and the same member...

This paper shows how separately itemised surcharges potentially facilitate collusion during a temporary marginal cost shock if firms commit to their duration. A duopoly model with price matching punishments shows that if firms set higher prices they only receive punishment during the shock...

This paper analyses the impact of various types of deregulation on banking industry structure. The empirical result is supported by evidence from Japan and Korea, which have undergone a substantial consolidation following a series of deregulation. The analysis is applied to a unique data set of...

This paper demonstrates how a profitable, downstream merget can lower the merged entity's input price while raising that of its rivals, leading to an adverse effect on final consumers. This novel 'waterbed' result is surprising and very different to the unilateral and co-ordinated effects...

This paper demonstrates that the Most-Favoured-Customer (MFC) clause identified in the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) Report of Foreign Package Holidays behaves not like an MFC but rather as if it was a variant of a so far unstudied price matching guarantee. This provides a clearer...