We develop a model for two-sided markets with consumers and producers, who interact through a platform. Typical settings for the model are the market for smartphones with phone users, app producers, and smartphone operating systems; or the video game market with game players, video game...

When Apple entered the ebook market, prices rose. A recent court decision found Apple guilty of colluding with publishers, blaming the price hike, in part, on agency agreements and prohibiting their use. Building a model to compare these with traditional wholesale agreements, we identify a...

Many countries with national health care providers and health insurances regulate the market for pharmaceuticals to steer drug demand and to control expenses. For example, they introduce reference pricing or tiered co-payments to enhance drug substitution and competition. Since 2006, Germany...

This paper studies unshrouding decisions in a framework similar to Gabaix and Laibson (2006), but considers an alternative unshrouding mechanism where the impact of advertising add-on information depends on the number of unshrouding firms. We show that shrouding becomes less prevalent as the...

We analyze how consumer myopia influences investment incentives into a technology that enables firms to track consumers' purchases and make targeted offers based on their preferences. In a two-period Hotelling setup firms may invest in customer-tracking technology. If a firm acquires the...

We analyze firms' location choices in a Hotelling model with two-dimensional consumer heterogeneity, along addresses and transport cost parameters (flexibility). Firms can price discriminate based on perfect data on consumer addresses and (possibly) imperfect data on consumer flexibility. We...

We investigate how firms' incentives to acquire customer data for targeted offers depend on its quality. A two-dimensional Hotelling model is proposed where consumers are heterogeneous both with respect to their locations and transportation cost parameters (flexibility). Firms have perfect data...

This paper studies the impact of entry of non-banks (termed Independent Service Operators, ISOs) into ATM markets. We compare two different regimes by which the ISO may generate income: i) The ISO receives interchange fees and ii) the ISO charges consumers directly. We find that due to the entry...

In this note we analyze the sustainability of collusion in a game of repeated interaction where firms can price discriminate among consumers based on two types of customer data. This work is related to Liu and Serfes (2007) and Sapi and Suleymanova (2013). Following Sapi and Suleymanova we...

We re-examine the common wisdom that cross-border mergers are the most effective merger strategy for firms facing powerful unions. In contrast, we obtain a domestic merger outcome whenever firms are sufficiently heterogeneous (in terms of productive efficiency and product differentiation). A...