We study final product manufacturers’ incentives to introduce new products into the market and how they are affected by a merger among them. We show that when manufacturers distribute their products through multi-product retailers, a manufacturers merger, although it leads to an increase in...

We study upstream horizontal mergers and their potential efficiency gains. We show that an upstream horizontal merger can give rise to two efficiency-enhancing effects when firms trade through two-part tariffs. It increases R&D investments and decreases wholesale prices when downstream...

The agency model used by Apple and other platform providers such as Google allows upstream firms (content providers like book publishers and developers of apps) to choose the retail prices of their products (RPM) subject to a fixed revenue-sharing rule. We show that (i) this leads to higher...

We consider a monopolistic supplier’s optimal choice of wholesale tariffs when downstream firms are privately informed about their retail costs. Under discriminatory pricing, downstream firms that differ in their ex ante distribution of retail costs are offered different tariffs. Under uniform...

The analysis of horizontal mergers hinges on a tradeoff between unilateral effects and efficiency gains. The article examines the role of uncertainty (on the efficiency gains) in this tradeoff. Common wisdom is that the antitrust authorities should be very cautious about random gains. Our...

A sufficiently rapidly rising carbon tax may increase near-term emissions compared with the case of no carbon tax. Even so, such a carbon tax path may reduce total costs related to climate change, since the tax may reduce total carbon extraction. A government cannot commit to a specific carbon...

When natural gas prices are subject to periodic decoupling from oil prices, for instance due to peak-load pricing, conventional linear models of price dynamics such as the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) can lead to erroneous inferences about cointegration relationships, price adjustments...

France has a very ambitious environmental-policy agenda, aimed chiefly at cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also at dealing with local air and water pollution, waste management and the conservation of biodiversity. The laws that followed the Grenelle de l’environnement encompass...

This paper analyzes market segmentation in a two-sided market that consists of media consumers and advertisers. The analysis is motivated by a European Court of Justice Decision in October 2011, which allowed viewers to take advantage of international price differences and buy access to Premier...

We develop a model of vertical pricing in which an original manufacturer sets wholesale prices in two markets integrated at the distributor level by parallel imports (PI). In this context we show that if competition policy requires uniform wholesale prices across locations it would push retail...