We consider a vertically related industry and analyze how the total harm due to a price increase upstream is distributed over downstream firms and final consumers. For this purpose, we develop a general model without making specific assumptions regarding demand, costs, or the mode of...

Competition has been modelled in economic literature in a number of ways. What do these different parameterizations of competition have in common? For instance, it turns out that it is not always the case that a rise in competition reduces price cost margins, industry wide profits or...

In countries like the US and the Netherlands health insurance is provided by private firms. These private firms can offer both individual and group contracts. The strategic and welfare implications of such group contracts are not well understood. Using a Dutch data set of about 700 group health...

This Paper introduces a new way to measure competition based on firms' profits. Within a general model, we derive conditions under which this measure is monotone in competition, where competition can be intensified both through a fall in entry barriers and through more aggressive interaction...

This paper proposes relative profits (RP) as a robust measure of competition. I consider nine different parameterizations of competition and show that more intense competition increases the profits of a firm relative to a less efficient firm. Further, popular competition measures like the...

We study optimal risk adjustment in imperfectly competitive health insurance markets when high-risk consumers are less likely to switch insurer than low-risk consumers. First, we find that insurers still have an incentive to select even if risk adjustment perfectly corrects for cost differences...

The Profit Elasticity (PE) is a new competition measure introduced in Boone (2008). So far, there was no direct proof that this measure can identify regimes of competition empirically. This paper focuses on this issue using data of Genesove and Mullin (1998) in which different regimes of...

We consider a vertically related industry and analyze how the total harm due to a price increase upstream is distributed over downstream firms and final consumers. For this purpose, we develop a general model without making specific assumptions regarding demand, costs, or the mode of...

We provide supporting evidence from the laboratory for the Nash predictions of the homogeneous-good Bertrand model under asymmetric constant unit costs.

We provide a modeling framework to think about selective contracting in the health care sector. Two health care providers differ in quality and costs. When buying health insurance, consumers observe neither provider quality nor costs. We derive an equilibrium where health insurers signal...