Low prices are one of antitrust law's traditional promises to society. Resale price maintenance (RPM), the practice whereby a manufacturer sets pricing rules for retailers, artificially inflates prices and, thus, allegedly runs afoul of antitrust laws. The practice emerged in the last quarter of...

Since the 1970s, at any given movie theater, one price has been charged for all movies, seven days a week, throughout the year. This Article studies the economic and legal causes that led to the formation of this peculiar phenomenon of uniform pricing for differentiated goods. The Article...

I analyze standard setting organizations' decisions on licensing policy and standard's technological specification, and the ensuing implications for social welfare. I find the conditions under which a licensing rule that grants monopoly power to the licensors whose technology is adopted in the...

I present a vertical differentiation model to assess the quality-wise strategy of an incumbent telecommunications operator under open access regimes. I show that it is always profitable for an incumbent subject to wholesale regulation to degrade wholesale quality in a non-recoverable fashion....

Italian Abstract: Come è stata modellata la pubblicità in economia? Essenzialmente la pubblicità è un modo di espandere la domanda. Nel caso di differenziazione orizzontale, la pubblicità può differenziare artificialmente un bene altrimenti omogeneo (pubblicità persuasiva) o rendere...

This paper studies the welfare effect of product incompatibility in complementary goods markets. Complementary goods are often incompatible across brands. Incompatibility imposes a choice constraint and increases consumers' costs of switching or upgrading. Firms take advantage of incompatibility...

If entry requires accommodation by retailers, the incumbent manufacturer may transfer profits to retailers to maintain his dominant position (Asker and Bar-Isaac 2014). This paper shows that such an incentive to transfer will induce the high quality entrants to disclose the quality of their...

Alliances between competitors where an established firm provides access to its marketing and distribution channels are an important real-world phenomenon. We analyze a market where an established firm, firm A, produces a product of well-known quality, and a firm with an unknown brand, firm B,...

This paper contains a theoretical analysis demonstrating that a retail price floor can increase the expected profits of an upstream firm when it is asymmetrically informed about the state of product demand. The retail price floor serves to eliminate the incentives of the upstream firm to...