We experimentally compare first-price auctions and multilateral negotiations after introducing horizontal product differentiation into a standard procurement setting. Both institutions yield identical surplus for the buyer, a difference from prior findings with homogeneous products that results...

Antitrust authorities have imposed firewalls between the previously separate divisions of newly vertically integrated firms in several industries, to address concerns that access to horizontal rivals' proprietary information may reduce competition. This paper evaluates a specific antitrust...

I develop an infinite-horizon alternating-offers model of multilateral negotiations, a common means of exchange whose strategic complexity has hindered previous modeling efforts. Multilateral negotiations occur in numerous settings in which one party wishes to trade with one of several others,...

This paper compares the equilibrium outcomes from a recently developed model of procurement competition with differentiated products to those from two analytically tractable models that might naturally be considered as suitable proxies. The models differ in what sellers know about the buyer's...

This paper uses computational methods that reveal ambiguous strategic effects of vertical mergers in a duopoly setting featuring incomplete information about sellers' costs, and differences in sellers' productive capabilities. First, vertical mergers can be jointly unprofitable. Second, the...

To enhance our understanding of collusion in procurement settings, this paper quantitatively evaluates how the buyer's choice of a reserve price influences the sustainability of two previously devised collusive schemes. If the buyer does not select its reserve price strategically, then collusion...