We reexamine the profitability and social efficiency of horizontal mergers in a Cournot oligopoly with decreasing average costs. Assuming the merger allows for efficiency gains in production, we identify the conditions under which the merger is, respectively, profitable and socially desirable....

Danish ready-mixed concrete is produced in regional oligopolies. Firms rely on price discrimination through secret discounts. The antitrust authority interprets this as lack of competition and has decided to activate its chief weapon against dormant competition: To make the market more...

We show that the fact that farmers in a cooperative individually decide how much to supply to cooperative may serve as a commitment device for credibility (and profitably) gaining market share in competition with a profit maximizing firm.

We study the role of two-part transfer schemes as signals of consumer demand from a privately informed franchisor to an uninformed franchisee. Distortions in the wholesale price and the up-front franchise fee offered by the high demand franchisor may possibly separate the different types of...

This paper considers investment decisions in a farmers' cooperative. Farmers sell their products through the cooperative. Before production takes place the cooperative has to decide on an investment. This is done by a vote in which each farmer has one vote, regardless of economic size. The paper...

In many industries manufacturers are more well-informed than retailers about the strength of final demand. We analyse a signalling model in which a monopolist manufacturer signals final demand, which can either be high or low, through his choice of wholesale price. The retailers then engage in...

The paper considers signalling games with two types of informed player. When the informed player's payoff function satisfies certain sorting and type monotonicity conditions, and when the uninformed player's response is a smooth strictly monotone mapping from posterior beliefs, the results of...