In media markets, products are highly differentiated but prices are often bunched at apparent focal points. I use a comprehensive cross-section data set on the German book market to assess whether such focal points are a result of upstream coordination and whether the option to impose resale...

Weekly sales of creative goods - like music records, movies or books - usually peak shortly after release and then decline quickly. In many cases, however, they follow a hump-shaped pattern where sales increase for some time. A popular explanation for this phenomenon is word of mouth among a...

In many intermediate goods markets buyers and sellers both have market power. Contracts are usually long-term and negotiated bilaterally, codifying many elements in addition to price. We model such bilateral oligopolies as a set of simultaneous Rubinstein-Ståhl bargainings over contracts...

The paper offers a new theoretical framework to examine the role of intermediaries between creators and potential users of new inventions. Using a model of university-industry technology transfer, we demonstrate that technology transfer offices can provide an opportunity to economize on a...

This paper introduces a simple extensive form pricing game where firms can react to each others’ price changes before the customers arrive. The Bertrand outcome is a Nash equilibrium outcome in this game, but it is not necessarily subgame perfect. The subgame perfect equilibrium outcome...

We provide a novel explanation as to why forming an alliance of buyers (or sellers) across separate markets can be advantageous when input prices are determined by bargaining. Our explanation helps to understand the prevalence of buyer cooperatives among small and medium sized firms. <br> <br>...</i>

This paper presents a model of takeover incentives in an oligopolistic industry, which,in contrast to previous approaches, takes both insiders' and outsiders' gains from anincrease in industry concentration into account. Our main application is to comparetakeover incentives in a differentiated...

Current anti-predation rules are designed to detect and prevent actions that are only taken to drive out a rival. We evaluate the performance of these rules in a simple entry game. We find that the rules used by competition authorities fail to encourage sustained competition in the market....

We explain the empirical puzzle why mergers reduce profits and raise share prices. If being an "insider" is better than being an "outsider," firms may merge to preempt their partner merging with a rival. The stock-value of the insiders is increased, since the risk of becoming an outsider is...

Antitrust policy involves not just the regulation of anti-competitive behavior, but also an important deterrence effect. Neither scholars nor policymakers have fully researched the deterrence effects of merger policy tools, as they have been unable to empirically measure these effects. We...