This paper investigates the effects on tacit collusion of increased market transparency on the consumer side as well as on the producer side of a market. Increasing market transparency on the consumer side, increases the benefits to a firm from undercutting the collusive price. It also decreases...

This paper presents a signaling model where both price and advertising expenditures are used as signals of the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good. Consumers can be either "fastidious" or "indifferent". Fastidious individuals place a greater value on a...

We show how different competitive regimes affect the ability to provide incentives based on noisy information systems. Reduced competition facilitates incentive provision. This may rationalize both vertical integration and horizontal integration as seen in many agricultural markets with...

We consider economies with incomplete markets, production, an a given distribution of initial endowments. The main purpose of the paper is to present a robust example of an economy with only one firm and one good per state in which no production decision entails a constrained efficient outcome....

This note relates to Topkis (1995). We establish via counterexample that:(i) A new monotone transformation of the firms' profit functions may lead to cardinal complementarity when the standard log and identity transformations both fail, and (ii) Topkis's notion of critical sufficient condition...

We investigate whether increased transparency about prices may increase the countervailing power exercised by buyers of an intermediate good and whether this will lead to a decrease of intermediate goods prices. We show that, even in a non-cooperative, one-shot model, the most likely outcome of...

Multi-period multi-product regulatory schemes for electricity distributors are presented, based on cost information from a productivity analysis model and an agency theoretical decision model. The proposed schemes are operational and demonstrate considerable advantages compared to the popular...

This paper deals with a general version of a two-stage model of R&D and product market competition. We provide a thorough generalization of previous results on the comparative performance of noncooperative and cooperative R&D, dispensing in particular with ex-post symmetry and linear demand...

We integrate strategic-trade and political-economy considerations in a unified framework to analyse unilateral trade policy. Foreign firms compete on Home's market through export or foreign direct investment (FDI). They also lobby Home's government which sets trade (tariff) and industrial (tax)...

The aim of the paper is to examine the relationship between R&D capital and productivity using micro data for Danish manufacturing firms. We account for the influence of factors such as ownership, innovative characteristics and source of funding. The return to accumulated R&D capital is...