The new US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission vertical merger guidelines promise enforcement based on how vertical mergers are likely to affect static pricing incentives, but the techniques for making robust predictions about the price effects of vertical mergers are...

We apply and extend the cost-based approach to bundling and tying under competition developed in Evans and Salinger (2004) to over-the-counter pain relievers and cold medicines. We document that consumers pay much less for tablets with multiple ingredients than they would if they bought tablets...

We apply and extend the cost-based approach to bundling and tying under competition developed in Evans and Salinger (2004a) to over-the-counter pain relievers and cold medicines. We document that consumers pay much less for tablets with multiple ingredients than they would to buy tablets with...

From the standpoint of competition policy, it might seem desirable to modularize competition to the greatest extent possible so that the best and cheapest products prevail at every stage of a production process and in every component of systems of complementary products. But integration can also...

I derive a Net Innovation Pressure (NIP) formula based on logic that is similar to the logic underlying Upward Pricing Pressure (UPP) and that takes account of R&D spillovers. As with UPP, diversion is a key determinant of NIP, but the price-cost margin is not. The formula, which is quite...

The growth of business firms is an example of a system of complex interacting units that resembles complex interacting systems in nature such as earthquakes. Remarkably, work in econophysics has provided evidence that the statistical properties of the growth of business firms follow the same...

We examine the merits of competition cases brought against Google with respect to alleged search bias. The four key steps in a structured investigation into an alleged abuse of dominance/monopolization/unfair method of competition are:1) characterization of the conduct, 2) market definition, 3)...

Patents declared to standard development organizations (SDOs) as potentially essential for compliance with standards under development within the SDO are typically bound by so-called FRAND commitments – promises from the patent holder to license the patents on fair, reasonable, and...

Gilbert and Katz (2006) (GK) show that allowing (pure) patent bundling increases the incentives for patent owners to enter into “long-term” patent licensing that commits them not to expropriate licensees’ sunk costs in complementary assets with opportunistic licensing terms. We interpret...