Providing health insurance involves a trade-off between the benefits from risk spreading and the costs due to moral hazard. Focusing on pharmaceuticals consumption, this paper examines theoretically whether reference pricing, requiring individuals to pay the price difference if, in this case,...

We study a setting where the opportunism or commitment problem identifed by Hart and Tirole (1990) may arise. An upstream monopolist may sell its product to two differentiated downstream retailers. Contract unobservability induces the manufacturer and each retailer to free-ride on margins earned...

This paper investigates a retailer's decision to introduce a private label and asks how the retailer's access to a private label may affect the pricing of substitute national brands. We consider a model with two vertically differentiated national brand manufacturers that negotiate sequentially...

Should governments allow parallel trade of pharmaceuticals? There is no clear-cut answer to this question, since parallel trade causes some public concerns. One is that prices might not decrease much in the home country because consumers are price insensitive as a result of medical insurance....

Aggregate shocks in demand such as the burst of the 2001 dot-com bubble affect firms’ behavior and, therefore, the market structure. This paper proposes a fully dynamic oligopoly model to evaluate the impact of aggregate demand shocks on entry and exit costs as well as on investment and labor...

We consider games where agents are embedded in a network of bilateral relationships and have multivariate strategy sets. Some components of their strategies correspond to individual activities, while the other strategic components are related to joint activities and interaction with the...

We study the competitive effects of restricting direct access to secondary care by gatekeeping, focusing on the informational role of gatekeeping general practitioners (GPs). We consider a secondary care market with two hospitals choosing the quality and specialisation of their care. GPs...

Conventional economic theory stipulates that output in Cournot competition is too low relative to that which is attained in perfect competition. We revisit this result in a General Cournot-competitive Equilibrium model with two industries that dier only in terms of productivity. We show that in...

The related phenomena of learning curve and network effects are quite common in oligopolistic markets. In this context the present paper discusses the incentives of a technological leader to share its exclusive technology with potential competitors. An alliance may be preferable because partner...

The clothing sector has been a driver of diversification and growth for countries that have graduated into middle income. Using a partial adjustment panel data model for 61 countries 1975-2000, we investigate the global international location of clothing production by using a combination of...