Poland provides a prime opportunity to study the emergence of businesses in newly formed capitalist economies and to compare this process with business creation elsewhere. Small businesses, which were virtually absent in Poland from 1940 to 1990, have now become, and are likely to remain, the...

The concept of relevant markets is fundamental to antitrust analysis, particularly to those relating to mergers. However, defining relevant markets is sometimes difficult ot operationalize. This has triggered a substantial literature in which price tests have been used to define both economic...

We show how rebates (or fidelity discounts) that take the form of lump-sum payments made to retailers can be used by an incumbent manufacturer to achieve exclusivity and to deter the entry of a more efficient rival. The results, which hold whatever the degree of differentiation between retailers...

This paper looks at a situation where a licensor owns a patent on a technology that allows the production of a new good. The licensor seeks to license its innovation to a set of producers that differ according to their marginal cost of producing an existing good. We show that the licensor is...

This paper shows that buying power at the retail level can lead to a rise in wholesale price. As a result, retailers without buying power may increase their retail price. Nevertheless, total surplus is non-decreasing in the degree of buying power possessed by the `dominant' retailer.

Harrington (2004) shows that conspirators can have incentives to maintain high prices after the cartel’s discovery to reduce damages they are likely to pay. We exploit the existence of a discovered retail gasoline price-fixing cartel in the province of Quebec to test this theory. The empirical...

On the basis of evidence of price-fixing, in May 2006 the Canadian Competition Bureau targeted retail gasoline outlets in some local markets in the province of Quebec. In June 2008, criminal charges were filed against many individuals and companies operating in those local markets. We employ a...