Fershtman and Judd (1987) and Sklivas (1987) have shown that strategic delegation under price competition makes firm owners choose incentive contracts that induce managers to be soft in order to reduce competitive intensity. We show in a worked-out example that under sufficiently strong network...

We analyze the formation of bilateral R&D collaborations in an oligopoly when each firm benefits from the research done by other firms it is connected to. In contrast to myopic stability, farsighted stability leads to R&D networks consisting of two minimally connected components, with the...

We consider a two-period model in which duopolists sell experience goods and practice behavior-based price discrimination (BBPD). We give general conditions for when firms should offer a lower price to existing customers (‘pay-to-stay’) or to new customers (‘pay-to-switch’). We also...

Myopic consumers underestimate the likelihood with which they will require follow-on services for products they purchase. Firms have an incentive to exploit this behavioral bias by skewing their price structure toward high add-on charges. Inadvertently, this skewed price structure provides...

Current Department of Justice merger guidelines assume that merging the capacities of two firms will translate into an equivalent increase in market shares. Size matters. Economic theory asserts size is determined by marginal revenue and marginal cost not capacity. Size does not matter. In this...

The two central pricing rules contained in most antitrust laws are prohibitions of below-cost pricing and prohibitions of discriminatory pricing. This article shows that the rule against discriminatory pricing may actually induce firms to charge exclusionary below-cost prices, even in the...

I show that marginal cost asymmetry has important implications for search models. In several widely used search models with mixed strategy equilibria, excluding some special cases, firms with different marginal costs cannot randomize prices in the same interval. So, even a small asymmetry in...

Harrington (2004) shows that conspirators can have incentives to maintain high prices after the cartel’s discovery to reduce damages they are likely to pay. We exploit the existence of a discovered retail gasoline price-fixing cartel in the province of Quebec to test this theory. The empirical...

This note investigates the effects of a large horizontal merger on the shape of the 1-to-12 h price menus offered by parking garages in Paris. The merger caused low-end prices to increase proportionally more than high-end prices. This results in larger discounts on longer hours and hence in more...

I develop a semi-structural approach to identify network effects on two-sided monopoly platforms without data on prices and quantities. When total revenue data is available, the test is sufficient. When separate revenue data is available on the two sides, the test is both necessary and sufficient.