We report experimental results on exclusive dealing inspired by the literature on “naked exclusion”. Our key findings are: First, exclusion of a more efficient entrant is a widespread phenomenon in lab markets. Second, allowing incumbents to discriminate between buyers increases exclusion...

We consider a vertically related industry and analyze how the total harm due to a price increase upstream is distributed over downstream firms and final consumers. For this purpose, we develop a general model without making specific assumptions regarding demand, costs, or the mode of...

We analyze the incidence and welfare effects of unit sales taxes in experimental monopoly and Bertrand markets. We find, in line with economic theory, that firms with no market power are able to shift a high share of a tax burden on to consumers, independent of whether buyers are automated or...

We report the results of a series of experimental Bertrand duopolies where firms have convex costs. Theoretically, these duopolies are characterized by a multiplicity of Nash equilibria. Using a 2x2 design, we analyze price choices in symmetric and asymmetric markets under two information...

The common prior assumption is pervasive in game-theoretic models with incomplete information. This paper investigates experimentally the importance of inducing a common prior in a two-person signaling game. For a specific probability distribution of the sender’s type, the long-run behavior...

We analyze exclusive contracts between health care providers and insurers in a model where some consumers choose to stay uninsured. In case of a monopoly insurer, exclusion of a provider changes the distribution of consumers who choose not to insure. Although the foreclosed care provider remains...

This paper introduces a workhorse model to analyze the effects of provider and insurer competition in health care markets. The two contracting imperfections we focus on are the following: (i) whether or not a patient should be treated and (ii) treatment quality are both not contractible. We...

The Profit Elasticity (PE) is a new competition measure introduced in Boone (2008). Sofar, there was no direct proof that this measure can identify regimes of competition empirically. This paper focuses on this issue using data of Genesove and Mullin (1998) in which different regimes of...

Many optimal contracting papers use quasi-linear preferences. To exclude stochastic mechanisms they impose a (su cient) condition on how the curvature of an agent's objective function varies with type. We show with quasi-linear preferences that an optimal deterministic outcome without bunching...

Putting a limit on the duration of unemployment benefits tends to introduce a “spike" in the job finding rate shortly before benefits are exhausted. Current theories explain this spike from workers' behavior. We present a theoretical model in which also the nature of the job matters....