This Paper investigates how the formation of larger buyers affects a supplier's profits and, by doing so, his incentives to undertake non-contractible activities. We first identify two channels of buyer power, which allows larger buyers to obtain discounts. We subsequently examine the effects of...

This Paper provides a conceptual framework of multilateral bargaining in a bilaterally oligopolistic industry to analyse the motivations for horizontal mergers, technology choice, and their welfare implications. We first analyse the implication of market structure for the distribution of...

We challenge the view that the presence of powerful buyers stifles suppliers' incentives to innovate. Following Katz (1987), we model buyer power as buyers' ability to substitute away from a given supplier and isolate several effects that support the opposite view, namely that the presence of...

This Paper presents a model of takeover incentives in an oligopolistic industry, which, in contrast to previous approaches, takes both insiders' and outsiders' gains from an increase in industry concentration into account. Our main application is to compare takeover incentives in a...

This Paper examines how different unionization structures affect firms' innovation incentives and industry employment. We distinguish three modes of unionization with increasing degree of centralization: (1) ‘decentralization’ where wages are determined independently at the firm-level, (2)...

This paper presents a set of panel data to study the diffusion of retail checkout barcode scanning in ten European countries over the period 1981-1996. Estimates from a standard diffusion model suggest that countries differ most in the long-run diffusion level of barcode scanning and less in...

This paper shows that investors financing a portfolio of projects may use the depth of their financial pockets to overcome entrepreneurial incentive problems. While competition for scarce informed capital at the refinancing stage increases the investor’s ex post bargaining position, it may...

Hierarchy can function as an instrument to channel influence activities or power struggles in organizations. Contrary to what has frequently been argued, we show that multi-divisional organizations may involve lower influence costs than single-tier organizations, even though they offer more...

This Paper develops an argument explaining why retail prices may rise in response to the deregulation of opening hours. We make this point in a model of imperfect duopolistic competition. In a deregulated market retailers view the choice of opening hours as a means to increase the degree of...

Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households’ investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...