Several recent articles have studied the competitive effects of horizontal mergers by examining rival firms' stock price reactions to the merger announcement and subsequent antitrust challenge. These articles have consistently failed to find any evidence of anticompetitive effects. This article...

A single seller of an indivisible object wishes to sell the good to one of many buyers. The seller has zero value for the good, the buyers have a commonly known identical value of one. This article attempts to determine strategic environments that ensure the seller's ability to exploit the...

We examine the investment decisions of regulated firms in a sequential-equilibrium model under asymmetric information. The regulator is unable to commit to a pricing policy, unlike mechanism-design models, but sets rates after observing the firm's investment. The information conveyed by the...

This article considers whether equitable rates to captive coal shippers are compatible with competitive rates of return in the rail industry. Using the results of a translog cost function based on panel data of Class I railroads for 1974-1986, I show that returns to scale are sufficiently large...

Extending the approach to congressional and regulatory institutions developed by Shepsle and Weingast, this article introduces an ideologically motivated judiciary. The model yields empirically refutable implications which are then tested in the framework of modelling the Court's decisions on...

This article presents a principal-agent model in which asymmetric information leads to contractual incompleteness. I show that in the presence of transactions costs, incompleteness may act as a signal of the principal's type. Two types of transactions costs are considered: those incurred ex ante...

This article examines plea bargaining where there are multiple defendants facing a prosecutor. The prosecutor's optimal offer to each defendant is shown to depend upon the following two factors: (i) the defendant's ex ante probability of conviction, and (ii) the defendant's ability to increase...

This article examines price discrimination and collusion in spatial markets. The problem is analyzed in the context of a repeated duopoly game. I conclude that the prevailing pricing systems depend on the structural elements of the market. Delivered pricing systems emerge in equilibrium in...