This upper-level undergraduate text provides an introduction to industrial organization theory along with applications and nontechnical analyses of the legal system and antitrust laws. Using the modern approach but without emphasizing the mathematical generality inherent in many of the...

We characterize the conditions under which industry-wide agreements on refund policies weaken price competition. We identify the conditions under which joint industry proffit increases with the amount of refunds promised to those consumers who cancel a reservation or return a product. We compare...

Using two standard location models, we investigate price competition and divergence from optimal product differentiation when consumer preferences are influenced by the number of consumers purchasing the same brand or shopping at the same store. Negative network effects tend to lessen...

This paper explains why payment card companies charge consumers and merchants fees which are proportional to the transaction values instead of charging a fixed per-transaction fee. Our theory shows that, even in the absence of any cost considerations, card companies earn much higher profit when...

This paper demonstrates that there is a strategic reason why software firms have followed consumers' desire to drop software protection. We analyze software protection policies in a price-setting duopoly software industry selling differentiated software packages, where consumers' preference for...

This short paper demonstrates that the equilibrium payoffs of an alternating-offers bargaining game over a unit of surplus converge to equal division provided that the parties are allowed to bargain over all the surpluses generated by the "right" to be the first to make offers. The result...

We evaluate behaviour-based price discrimination from an antitrust perspective by focusing on an industry with inherited market dominance. Under horizontal differentiation behaviour-based pricing does not by itself lead to persistence of dominance unless the dominant firm is protected by...