It is well-known that switching costs may facilitate monopoly pricing in a market with price competition between two suppliers of a homogenous good, provided the switching cost is above some critical level. We show that introducing consumer heterogeneity tends to increase the critical switching...

We examine the optimal regulation of agricultural markets when farmers have organized their activity in a cooperative which is the monopoly supplier of an upstream product and which competes with a single rival firm in selling a homogenous downstream product. The rival's marginal cost is private...

In a non-cooperative oligopoly model where firms use simple linear prices, Klemperer (1987) has shown that the existence of consumers’ switching costs may generate monopoly like prices, and thereby create substantial loss in welfare. We show that when allowing firms to use two-part tariffs,...

According to the new European telecom regulation, incumbent operators are required to provide access to such bottlenecks on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. We explore different interpretations of this general rule in a model in which the bottleneck can be used by external (to the...

Received literature have shown that if competing networks are restricted to linear and uniform pricing, high access charges can facilitate collusion; a result that breaks down if we allow for non-linear and discriminatory pricing, however. In this paper we add unbalanced calling pattern to the...