The importance of institutions for economic growth has gathered considerable interest. For example, weak institutions can prevent firms from communicating their quality, which can lead to lower welfare. We explore how and whether exporting to markets with strong institutions may alleviate this...

The conventional antitrust wisdom is that the formation of patent pools is welfare en- hancing when patents are complementary, since the pool avoids a double-marginalization problem associated with independent licensing. The focus of this paper is on (down- stream) product development and...

The decision to request a preliminary injunction—a court order that bans a party from certain actions until their lawfulness are ascertained in a final court ruling at trial—is an important litigation instrument in many areas of the law including antitrust, copyright, patents, trademarks,...

Cassady (1967) describes an auction in which the auctioneer “fishes” for an opening bid, calling out lower and lower amounts until an opening bid is eventually placed. Once a bid is placed, it is not uncommon for the bidding to escalate above the initial starting price. The current study...

Information frictions play a key role in a wide array of economic environments and are frequently incorporated into formal models as search costs. Yet, as search costs are typically unobserved, little empirical work investigates the determinants of the distribution of consumer search costs and...

This paper considers the effects of joint negotiation when suppliers and intermediaries engage in bilateral negotiation over inclusion of a supplier’s product in an intermediary’s network. I identify conditions under which joint negotiation by two suppliers increases the suppliers’...

We demonstrate that cost pass-through can be used to inform demand calibration, potentially eliminating the need for data on margins, diversion, or both. We derive the relationship between cost pass-through and consumer demand using a general oligopoly model of Nash-Bertrand competition and...

We show how observed product margins may be used in lieu of an observed market elasticity to calibrate parameters for two commonly used demand forms: the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) and the multinomial logit. This technique is useful for antitrust practitioners interested in simulating the...

We analyze the accuracy of first order approximation, a method developed theoretically in Jaffe and Weyl (2012) for predicting the price effects of mergers, and provide an empirical application. Approximation is an alternative to the model-based simulations commonly employed in industrial...

We show that, in general, consistent estimates of cost pass-through are not obtained from reduced-form regressions of price on cost. We derive a formal approximation for the bias that arises even under standard orthogonality conditions. We provide guidance on the conditions under which bias may...