Many cartels are formed by individual managers of different firms, but not by firms as collectives. However, most of the literature in industrial economics neglects individuals' incentives to form cartels. Although oligopoly experiments reveal important insights on individuals acting as firms,...

We analyze the pricing behavior of firms when explicit partial cartels have formed in experimental markets through communication. Using a repeated, asymmetric capacity constraint price game, we show that, in line with theory, a partial cartel is sufficient to increase market prices for all...

We review the Chicago school's single monopoly profit theory whereby an upstream monopolist cannot increase its profits through vertical integration as it has sufficient market power anyways. In our model the dominant supplier has full bargaining power and uses observable two-part tariffs. We...

This article investigates the relationship between income inequality and firms' locations and product choices. Using detailed information on income at a regionally disaggregated level and individual data on Austrian restaurants, we demonstrate that firm conduct crucially depends on the...

We study the incentives of firms that hold partial vertical ownership to foreclose rivals. Compared to a full vertical merger, with partial ownership, a firm may obtain only part of the target's profit but may nevertheless be able to influence the target's strategy significantly. The target may...

We study zero-rating, a practice whereby an Internet service provider (ISP) that limits retail data consumption exempts certain content from that limit. This practice is particularly controversial when an ISP zero-rates its own vertically integrated content, because the data limit and ensuing...

We study a Hotelling framework in which customers first pay a monopoly platform to enter the market before deciding between two competing services on opposite ends of a Hotelling line. This setup is common when modeling competition in Internet content provision. We find that standard...

We analyze firms' ability to sustain collusion in a setting in which horizontally differentiated firms can price-discriminate based on private information regarding consumers' preferences. In particular, firms receive private signals which can be noisy (e.g., big data predictions). We find that...

This paper investigates how privacy regulation affects the structure of online markets. We provide a simple theoretical model capturing the basic trade-off between the degree of privacy intrusion and the informativeness of advertising. We derive empirically testable hypotheses regarding a...

We analyze the effect of different pricing schemes on horizontally differentiated firms' ability to sustain collusion when customers have the possibility to combine (or mix) products to achieve a better match of their preferences. To this end, we compare two-part tariffs with linear prices and...