It is often argued that, first, the decision criterion of antitrust authorities should be total social welfare and that, second, mergers increasing the value of this criterion but ending with lower consumer surplus should be allowed in the name of efficiency gains realized by merging firms. This...

We introduce labor contracts, in a framework of optimal redistribution: firms have some local market power and try to discriminate among heterogeneous workers. In this setting we show that if the firms have perfect information, i.e, they perfectly discriminate against workers and take all the...

A benevolent social planner which faces a cost of public funds because of distortive taxation, wants to finance an upstream monopoly. This monopoly produces a necessary input for a downstream competitive sector which competes à la Cournot (with either a fixed number of firms or free entry in...