We present a model of the TV-advertising market that encompasses both the product markets and the market for TV programs. We argue that the TV industry has several idiosyncratic characteristics that need to be modeled, and show that the strategic interaction in this industry differs from other...

The economics of crime and punishment postulates that higher punishment leads to lower crime levels, or less severe crime. It is however hard to get empirical support for this rather intuitive relationship. This paper offers a model that can contribute to explain why this is the case. We show...

This study develops and uses a successive oligopoly model, with an unobservable non-linear tariff between upstream and downstream firms, to analyze the possible anti-competitive effects of an upstream merger. We nd that an upstream merger may lead to higher average prices paid by downstream...

This paper deals with the enforcement of merger policy, and aims to study how merger emedies affect the deterrence accomplished by controlling mergers. We determine the optimal frequency of investigations launched by the agency, and identify situations where the introduction of remedies can lead...

In many two-sided markets we observe that there is a common distributor on one side of the market. One example is the TV industry, where TV channels choose advertising prices to maximize own profi…t and typically delegate determination of viewer prices to independent distributors. We show that...

The notion 'semicollusion' refers to situations where firms collude in one (or several) choice variable(s) and compete in others. For example, firms collude on prices and compete on advertising. Although the notion 'semicollusion' is not so often used explicitly, it turns out that the topic is...

This paper deals with the enforcement of merger policy, and aims to identify situations where the introduction of remedies can lead to a lower welfare. For this we study how merger remedies affect the deterrence accomplished by controlling mergers, and determine the optimal frequency of...

<italic>Since at least the early 1990s, researchers have criticized the antitrust authorities' method for assessing the possible anticompetitive effects of mergers. Despite this, only recently, a method with a more sound economic foundation was included in the merger guidelines. We discuss how a sound...</italic>