The recent subprime crisis and the ongoing Euro zone crisis have generated an enormous interest in the credit rating industry not only among economists but also among average citizens. As a consequence, we have seen an explosion of the economic literature on the industry. The objective of this...

This paper analyzes how the stability of the tacit cooperation within a fringe of sev- eral identical ?rms is a¤ected by the presence of a more e¢ cient ?rm which does not take part in their cooperative agreement. The model assumes that the ?rms of the fringe adopt ?stick and carrot?strategies...

Two-period Cournot competition between n identical firms producing at constant marginal cost and able to store before selling has pure strategy Nash- perfect equilibria, in which some firms store to exert endogenously a leader- ship over rivals. The number of firms storing balances market share...

We study merger waves in vertically related industries where firms can engage in both vertical and horizontal mergers. Even though any individual merger would have been profitable, firms may refrain from merging for fear of negative impacts from other mergers. When they do merge, however, they...

We show that the standard analysis of vertical relationships transposes directly to investment timing. Thus, when a firm undertaking a project requires an outside supplier (e.g. an equipment manufacturer) to provide it with a discrete input, and if the supplier has market power, investment...

We model investments in capacity in a homogeneous product duopoly facing uncertain demand growth. Capacity building is achieved through adding production units that are durable and lumpy and whose cost is irreversible. There is no exogenous order of moves, no first-mover or second-mover...

Theories of multi-sided markets suggest that a platform’s pricing strategies on different sides of the market are closely linked, and in particular, an increase in competition on one side may lead to an increase in price on other sides. We empirically examine platforms’ pricing strategies by...

The externalities advertisers receive from newspaper readers and that operating system users receive from software developers are among the leading features of those “platform” industries. However, they are rarely incorporated into applied models of imperfect competition. We argue this...

Pricing of Internet access has been characterized by two properties. Parties are directly billed only by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) through which they connect to the Internet and the ISP charges them on the basis of the amount of information transmitted rather than its content. These...

This paper studies the impact of heterogeneity in interdependence of trader values on price inference and welfare. A model of double auction with quasilinear-quadratic utilities is introduced that allows for arbitrary Gaussian information structures. With heterogeneous interdependence, some...