Credit rating agencies play a crucial role in financial markets. There are two competing views regarding their behavior: some argue that they engage in rating inflation, while others suggest that they deflate ratings. This article offers a rationale that reconciles the two opposite arguments. We...

We study incentives for innovations that enable firms to enter backward into the input market. Such innovations are disruptive in that they lead to structural changes and even reversal of supply-customer relationships. We first show that Arrow's replacement effect is also present in our vertical...