We examine the equilibrium price, investment, and capital structure of a regulated firm using a sequential model of regulation. We show that the firm's capital structure has a significant effect on the regulated price. Consequently, the firm chooses its equity and debt strategically to affect...

The regulated firm's choice of capital structure is affected by countervailing incentives: the firm wishes to signal high value to capital markets to boost its market value while also signalling high cost to regulators to induce rate increases. When the firm's investment is large, countervailing...

Horizontal subcontracting agreements between rival firms, each of which is capable of producing and marketing its products independently, are common. This article explains this practice and evaluates its welfare implications. The analysis shows that firms with asymmetric convex costs can use...

We examine the effects that passive investments in rival firms have on the incentives of firms to engage in tacit collusion. In general, these incentives depend in a complex way on the entire partial cross ownership (PCO) structure in the industry. We establish necessary and sufficient...

We consider an optimal regulation model in which the regulated firm's production cost is subject to random, publicly observable shocks. The distribution of these shocks is correlated with the firm's cost type, which is private information. The regulator designs an incentive-compatible regulatory...

We examine the investment decisions of regulated firms in a sequential-equilibrium model under asymmetric information. The regulator is unable to commit to a pricing policy, unlike mechanism-design models, but sets rates after observing the firm's investment. The information conveyed by the...

This article studies pricing for natural monopolies by using a cooperative game of joint production. Outputs are allocated by a price system. We introduce the concept of the second-best core, which is a subset of the set of zero-profit, second-best Pareto-optimal prices. Prices are such that no...