Merger activity is intense during economic booms and subdued during recessions. This paper provides a non-financial explanation for this observable pattern. We construct a model in which the target—by setting the takeover price—screens the acquirer on his (expected) ability to realize...

Network industries with low sunk costs have been popular examples for the theory of contestable markets and spatial competition models. We argue that, due to the multimarket nature of operations, theories of predation are more relevant to explain strategic behaviour. Building on well established...

Current anti-predation rules are designed to detect and prevent actions that are only taken to drive out a rival. We evaluate the performance of these rules in a simple entry game. We find that the rules used by competition authorities fail to encourage sustained competition in the market....

We provide a novel explanation as to why forming an alliance of buyers (or sellers) across separate markets can be advantageous when input prices are determined by bargaining. Our explanation helps to understand the prevalence of buyer cooperatives among small and medium sized firms.

This paper investigates the effects of industry-wide unions and employers. associations in a duopolistic industry. Using an efficient bargaining model, we show that it is profitable for workers to form an industry union if firms produce goods that are substitutes. In our model industry-wide...

We develop a model in which two firms that have proposed to merge are privately informed about merger-specific efficiencies. This enables the firms to influence the merger control procedure by strategically revealing their information to an antitrust authority. Although the information improves...

We study tacit collusion in repeated auctions in which bidders can only observe past winners and not their bids. We adopt a stringent interpretation of tacit collusion as collusion without communication about strategies that we model as a symmetry restriction on repeated game strategies:...

We propose a solution for bargaining problems where coalitions are bargainers. The solution generalizes the Nash solution and allows one to interpret a coalition as an institutional player whose preferences are obtained by aggregating the preferences of the individual members. One implication of...

The paper shows that integrating two players on the same side of two independent bilateral monopoly markets can increase their bargaining power. A leading example of such a situation is bargaining between cable operators and broadcasters regarding the carriage of broadcasters. signals on cable...

We study collusion in repeated first-price auctions under the condition of minimal information release by the auctioneer. In each auction a bidder only learns whether or not he won the object. Bidders do not observe other bidders’ bids, who participates or who wins in case they are not the...