economy where oligopolistic firms establish in-house R&D programs to produce a continuous flow of cost-reducing (incremental) innovations. The scale of firms' R&D operations determines the rate of productivity growth. I first study the role of concentration, firm size, and demand,...

With the proliferation of private standards many significant decisions regarding public health risks, food safety, and environmental impacts are increasingly taking place in the backstage of the global agro-food system. Using an analytical framework grounded in political economy, we explain the...

We report experimental results on duopoly pricing with and without price beating guarantees (PBG). In two control treatments, price beating is either imposed as an industry-wide rule or offered as a business strategy. Our major finding is that when price beating guarantees are imposed as a rule...

The aim of this paper is to summarize the theory of (implicit) collusion in the framework of infinitely repeated games, and in particular, to survey the comprehensive literature exploring which factors make collusion easier or more difficult to sustain. On this basis, the existing empirical...

We examine the interplay of endogenous vertical integration and costreducing downstream investment in successive oligopoly. We start from a linear Cournot model to motivate our more general reducedform framework. For this general framework, we establish the following main results: First,...

We examine vertical backward integration in oligopoly. Analysing a standard linear Cournot model, we find that for wide parameter ranges (i) some firms integrate, while others remain separated, and (ii) efficient firms are more likely to integrate vertically. Adopting a reduced-form approach, we...