Constantly rising expenditures for pharmaceuticals require government intervention in firms' pricing decisions. To this end, reference pricing systems are a frequently employed regulatory mechanism. This paper considers a duopoly market with vertically differentiated firms under different...

Der Europäische Rat entscheidet 1998, welche Länder an der 1999 beginnenden Währungsunion teilnehmen werden. Sechs Jahre nach der Unterzeichnung der Maastricht-Verträge steht dem Konvergenzfortschritt bei der Preis- und Zinsentwicklung eine unzureichende Konvergenz bei der Finanzlage der...

It has been suggested that mergers, by increasing concentration, raise incentives to invest and hence are pro-competitive. To study the effects of mergers, we rewrite a game with simultaneous price and cost-reducing investment choices as one where firms only choose prices, and make use of...

For many products, platforms enable sellers to transact with buyers. We show that the competitive conditions among sellers shape the market structure in platform industries. If product market competition is tough, sellers avoid competitors by joining different platforms. This allows platforms to...

We investigate a market in which experts have a moral hazard problem because they need to invest in costly but unobservable effort to identify consumer problems. Experts have either high or low qualification and can invest either high or low effort in their diagnosis. High skilled experts are...

Moral hazard in expert diagnoses is more complicated in credence goods markets because ex-post verification of service optimality is usually not possible. We provide an experimental framework to investigate expert and consumer behavior as well as market efficiency in a setting in which experts...

This paper focuses on a single firm with constant returns to scale in a multi-period setting with incomplete markets and a single good per state. Profits vanish whenever the firm maximizes profits with respect to a given price system. The paper addresses the following question: Shall the firm...

This study provides a comprehensive picture of experimental Kreps-Scheinkman markets with capacity choice in the first stage and subsequent price competition at the second. We conduct seven different treatments of such markets, varying the number of firms, the demand rationing scheme, the...

How strong are strategic complementarities in price setting across firms? In this paper, we provide a direct empirical estimate of firms' price responses to changes in prices of their competitors. We develop a general framework and an empirical identification strategy to estimate the...

We investigate the impact of consumer search and competition on pricing strategies in Germany’s electricity retail. We utilize a unique panel dataset on spatially varying search requests at major online price comparison websites to construct a direct measure of search intensity and combine...

The way profits are divided within successful teams imposes different degrees of internal conflict. We experimentally examine how the level of internal conflict, and whether such conflict is transparent to other teams, affects teams' ability to compete vis-à-vis each other, and, consequently,...