We study the relationship between competition and quality within a spatial competition framework where firms compete in prices and quality. We generalise existing literature on spatial price-quality competition along several dimensions, including utility functions that are non-linear in income...

Using a spatial competition framework with three ex ante identical firms, we study the effects of a horizontal merger on quality, price and welfare. The merging firms always reduce quality. They also increase prices if demand responsiveness to quality is sufficiently low. The non-merging firm,...

We find that trade unions have a rational incentive to oppose the adoption of labour-saving technology when labour demand is inelastic and unions care much for employment relative to wages. Trade liberalization typically increases trade union technology opposition. These conclusions are reached...

We examine how a merger affects wages of unionized labour and, in turn, the profitability of a merger under Cournot competition in differentiated products. If unions are plant-specific, we find that a merger is more profitable than in a corresponding model with exogenous wages. In contrast to...

We investigate the effect of competition on quality in regulated markets (e.g., health care, higher education, public utilities), using a Hotelling framework, in the presence of sluggish demand. We take a differential game approach, and derive the open-loop solution (providers commit to an...

We investigate the effect of competition on quality in regulated markets (e.g., health care, higher education, public utilities) taking a differential game approach, in which quality is a stock variable. Using a Hotelling framework, we derive the open-loop solution (providers commit to an...

Firms in markets such as health care and education are often profit constrained due to regulation or their non-profit status, and they are often viewed as being altruistic towards consumers. We use a spatial competition framework to study incentives for cost containment and quality provision by...

We study the impact of regulation on competition between brand-names and generics and pharmaceutical expenditures using a unique policy experiment in Norway, where reference pricing (RP) replaced price cap regulation in 2003 for a sub-sample of off-patent products. First, we construct a vertical...

In many markets, such as education, health care and public utilities, firms are often profit-constrained either due to regulation or because they have non-profit status. At the same time such firms might have altruistic concerns towards consumers. In this paper we study semi-altruistic firms’...

We study the impact of product margins on pharmacies' incentive to promote generics instead of brand-names. First, we construct a theoretical model where pharmacies can persuade patients with a brand-name prescription to purchase a generic version instead. We show that pharmacies' substitution...