This paper analyses recent trends in wage bargaining institutions in Europe to explain the gradual deterioration in the bargaining position of trade unions. It appears that the integration of European economies is an important factor. This raises the question whether trade unions will respond...

Targeted advertising can benefit consumers through lower prices for access to websites. Yet, if consumers dislike that websites collect their personal information, their welfare may go down. We study competition for consumers between websites that can show targeted advertisements. We find that...

The Profit Elasticity (PE) is a new competition measure introduced in Boone (2008). So far, there was no direct proof that this measure can identify regimes of competition empirically. We focus on this issue using data of Genesove and Mullin (1998), in which different regimes of competition...

In this paper, the authors study optimal risk adjustment in imperfectly competitive health insurance markets when high-risk consumers are less likely to switch insurer than low-risk consumers.<font face="CMR10" size="3"><font face="CMR10" size="3">First, they find that insurers still have an incentive to select even if risk adjustment perfectly...</font></font>

The strategic and welfare implications of group contracts for health insurance are not well understood. We estimate a model to determine which factors explain the price of group contracts. In countries like the US and the Netherlands health insurance is provided by private firms, which can...

Access regulation has been designed for PSTN and the liberalization of the PSTN market. This paper explores the effects of the regulation on consumers’ adoption of a new technology in the form of VoIP. It also discusses the link between access regulation and the incentives to invest in VoIP.

We discuss and apply a new measure of competition: the elasticity of a firm's profits with respect to its cost level. A higher value of this profit elasticity (PE) signals more intense competition. Using firm level data we compare PE with the most popular competition measures such as the price...

We construct a model for differentiated Cournot competition between service-based and infrastructure-based firms, out of which one infrastructure-based firm (the incumbent) supplies to the service-based firms. We seek for and compare the socially optimal and the incumbent’s profit maximizing...

We analyse the interplay between investigation policies, deterrence and desistance in a model where a competition authority monitors multiple sectors and faces a budget constraint that prevents it from deterring cartels in all sectors simultaneously. Most studies of competition law enforcement...

In this paper, we analyze the effect of access regulation and retail price regulation of PSTN networks on the adoption of a new technology in the form of VoIP. The introduction of packet-switched telephony in the form of VoIP raises concerns about current regulatory practice of access,...