After describing the essential features of the book market, a welfare analysis of the fixed book price agreement is given. Allowance is made for the opportunity cost of reading. Theoretically, the agreement pushes up book prices and depresses book sales. However, more titles will be published,...

Merchant guilds have been portrayed as "social networks" that generated beneficial "social capital" by sustaining shared norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action. This social capital, it is claimed, benefited society as a whole by enabling...

We study antitrust enforcement in which the fine must obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. We integrate these legal principles into an infinitely-repeated oligopoly model, where bankruptcy considerations...

The conventional wisdom is that the formation of patent pools is welfare enhancing when patents are complementary, since the pool avoids a double-marginalization problem associated with independent licensing. This conventional wisdom relies on the effects that pooling has on downstream prices....

Although antitrust courts sometimes stress the competitive process, they have not deeply explored what that process is. Inspired by the theory of the core, we explore the idea that the competitive process is the process of sellers and buyers forming improving coalitions. Much of antitrust can be...

We analyze mixed bundling in two-sided markets where installed base effects are present and find that the pricing structure deviates from traditional bundling as well as the standard two-sided markets literature - we determine prices on both sides fall with bundling. Mixed bundling acts as a...

It is argued that, in certain oligopolistic markets, the structural conditions are such that the players on the market will be able to earn supra-competitive profits without having to enter into an agreement or concerted practice thereto. This article outlines the development of the...

This paper investigates the determination of the merchant usage fee of a monopolistic unitary payment card network based on characteristics of the downstream market. Merchants engage in Bertrand price competition that allows for an observation of heterogeneous products. We find that the payment...

I analyze the effects of a merger between two firms in a differentiated-goods duopoly. I make the crucial assumption that the industry is at a free-entry equilibrium both before and after the merger. In particular, I allow for the possibility of entry subsequent to the merger. Not surprisingly,...