The conventional wisdom is that the formation of patent pools is welfare enhancing when patents are complementary, since the pool avoids a double-marginalization problem associated with independent licensing. This conventional wisdom relies on the effects that pooling has on downstream prices....

We study joint marketing arrangements by competing firms who engage in price discrimination between consumers who patronize only one firm (single purchasing) and those who purchase from both competitors (bundle purchasers). Two types of joint marketing are considered. Firms either commit to a...

We develop a model for two-sided markets with consumers and producers, who interact through a platform. Typical settings for the model are the market for smartphones with phone users, app producers, and smartphone operating systems; or the video game market with game players, video game...

We contrast a standard deterministic signaling game with one where the signal-generating mechanism is stochastic. With stochastic signals a unique equilibrium emerges that involves separation and has intuitive comparative-static properties as the degree of signaling depends on the prior type...

This paper offers a new mechanism to explain de-industrialisation in response to a price increase of the manufactured good. In our trade model, one sector (agriculture) is perfectly competitive while the other (manufacturing) is monopolistically competitive. Both industries use skilled and...

Organizational decisions in multistage production processes are often not made by the downstream headquarter firm, but by the various intermediate inputs suppliers along the value chain themselves. We assume a production process with one headquarter (final good producer) and two suppliers at...

Price levels and movements on gasoline and diesel markets are heavily debated among consumers, policy-makers, and competition authorities alike. In this paper, we empirically investigate how and why price levels differ across gasoline stations in Germany, using eight months of data from a novel...

This paper analyses the income effect of the participation in elite sports using a unique dataset on former German top-level athletes. To quantify the average treatment effect we use covariate nearestneighbour matching. While our treatment group consists of formerly top-level athletes the...

This study contributes to the ongoing debate on the relevance of non-executive outside directors for corporate governance building on a large panel of European listed firms in the period 2003 to 2011. Focusing on executive turnover as an indicator for effective monitoring, the findings reveal...