This paper surveys recent work on competition in markets in which consumers face costs to switching between competing firms' products, even when all firms' products are functionally identical. I address issues in macroeconomics, international trade and industrial organization: In a market with...

Unprecendented growth of barter is a striking phenomenon of Russia's transition. The explanations of barter include tight monetary policy, tax evasion and poor financial intermediation. We show that the market power may also be important. We build a model of imperfect competition in which firms...

Flexibility - the ability to react swiftly to others' choices - facilitates collusion by reducing gains from defection before opponents react. Under imperfect monitoring, however, flexibility may also hinder collusion by inducing punishment after too few noisy signals. The combination of these...

Although naive intuition may indicate the opposite, the existing literature suggests that uncertainty about costs in the homogeneous-good Bertrand model intensifies competition: it lowers price and raises total surplus (but also makes profits go up). Those results, however, are derived under two...

We analyze the optimal dynamic policy of an antitrust authority towards horizontal mergers when merger proposals are endogenous and occur over time. Approving a currently proposed merger will affect the profitability and welfare effects of potential future mergers, the characteristics of which...

This Paper provides an empirical examination of third-degree price discrimination in the Swedish newspaper industry. The results show that price discrimination is more prevalent in competitive markets and among newspapers with low market shares. This supports predictions from recent theoretical...

I characterize the effects of empirically observed managerial incentives on long-run oligopolistic competition. When managers have a preference for smooth time-paths of profits – as revealed by the empirical literature on ‘income smoothing’ – manager-led firms can sustain collusive...