Since the deregulation of rates for basic cable television service, increases in price have outpaced the rate of inflation. This article examines whether or not cable systems' increased market power, or their increased exercise of market power, explains these price increases. An estimated...

Although telephone pricing has received increasing attention in recent years, the geographic patterns of telephone pricing and the corresponding economic consequences of those patterns have remained perplexing to consumers and policymakers and largely unaddressed by economists. In this article...

We consider the incentives for oligopolistic manufacturers to adopt exclusive dealing. Manufacturers producing differentiated brands can choose to distribute through exclusive retail dealerships or nonexclusive dealerships. With nonexclusive dealing, manufacturers face an interbrand externality...

This article examines decision myopia under effort and risk neutrality. An infinite, non-overlapping sequence of mortal managers is selected and their performance evaluated. Contracts admit premature termination. Plant condition depends on maintenance, which induces an interstage linkage in...

Neoclassical theory suggests that when an industry is shaken by radical technological change, incumbent firms will be replaced by entrants because entrants have greater strategic incentives to invest in radical innovation. Organizational theory suggests that incumbent firms fail in the face of...

Learning from experience in the nuclear industry has had a significant impact on the operating performance of light water reactor (LWR) power plants. Performance comparisons between the United States and France indicate that the relationship between experience and performance has been strongly...

While under some circumstances information sharing in oligopoly may be beneficial, the literature ignores the possibility of strategic information sharing by assuming verifiability of data. I endogenize the incentives for truthful information sharing and prove that if firms have the ability to...

This article examines the stock market response to acquisition announcements during and immediately after the conglomerate merger wave of the late 1960s. The main finding is that acquirer shareholders benefited from diversification acquisitions, which implies that diversification was not driven...

This article formalizes the intuition that equity provides firms with a cushion against aggregate fluctuations. We show that equity allows a firm to share aggregate risks with its creditors, minimizing the chance that a recession could push it into financial distress. The tax bias against equity...

Predictions from a principal-agent analysis of the manufacturer-retailer relationship are tested using microdata on contractual form, retail outlet characteristics, and retail prices for gasoline stations in eastern Massachusetts. The empirical results are consistent with upstream firms choosing...