While humans often care about sunk investment, animals are not subject to this sort of sunk cost behavior or "Concorde fallacy". This paper investigates a simple two stage decision problem under uncertainty. At the second stage, subjects can commit the Concorde fallacy by sticking to the first...

Scarce interconnector capacities are a severe obstacle to transregional competition and a unified market for electricity in the European Union. However, physically the interconnectors are rarely used up to capacity. This is due to the fact that the current allocation schemes make only limited...

The seasonal demand for natural gas requires supply flexibility. This "swing" is now largely provided in northwestern Europe by indigenous production. Declining reserves will increase the dependency on imports from far-off sources, which are less flexible. Hence, flexibility must be provided by...

The standard model by Laffont, Rey and Tirole (1998) treats termination fees as an instrument to increase market power in a one-shot game of horizontal product differentiation. We offer an alternative view in an infinitely repeated Bertrand competition. We focus on symmetrical calling patterns...

The economic analysis of trade-secret protection has traditionally focused on the interests of companies to conceal information from competitors in order to gain competitive advantage through trade-secret law. This has neglected cases in which the interest is not in concealing information from...

Prices may differ between regional markets if transport capacities are limited. We develop a new approach to determine to which extent such differences stem from limited participation in cross-border trader, i.e. lack of integration, rather than from bottlenecks. This approach considers both...

We study an industry in which an upstream monopolist supplies an essential input at a regulated price to several downstream firms. Legal unbundling means that a downstream firm owns the upstream firm but this upstream firm is legally independent and maximizes its own upstream profits. We allow...

We study an industry with a monopolistic bottleneck (e.g. a transmission network) supplying an essential input to several downstream firms. Under legal unbundling the bottleneck must be operated by a legally independent upstream firm, which may be partly or fully owned by an incumbent active in...

Linear demand formulations for price competition in horizontally differentiated products are sometimes used to compare situations where additional varieties become available, e. g. due to market entry of new firms. We derive a consistent demand system to analyze such situations.