Leniency programs reduce sanctions for law violators that self-report. We focus on their ability to deter cartels and organized crime by increasing incentives to "cheat" on partners. Optimally designed "courageous" leniency programs reward the first party that reports with the fines paid by all...

This paper shows how competing firms can facilitate tacit collusion by making passive investments in rivals. When firms are identical, only multilateral partial cross ownership (PCO) facilitates tacit collusion; the incentives of firms to collude in this case depend in a comlex way on the whole...

This paper considers the possibility that a seller can contract with one uninformed buyer prior to an auction involving two potential buyers. In a more general setting than previous literature, strategic ex-ante contracts not only extract rent from entrants, but could also mitigate the...

This article investigates how antitrust agencies should structure the disclosing of information about efficiency gains from interested parties (merging firms, and competitors) in merger control. We analyze the particular case of a horizontal merger with danger of foreclosure, where welfare can...

The emergence of powerful, big box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot has enhanced the interest among both academics and non-academics in the effects of countervailing power. One of the major concerns expressed by some commentators is that rising countervailing power will lead to poorer...

In this paper, we model networks of relational contracts. We explore sanctioning power within these networks under different information technologies depending on the shape of the network. The value of the relational network lies in the enforcement of cooperative agreements which would not be...

Many commodities are such that the utility they create for individual consumers depends positively on the number of people also consuming these goods. Prominent examples among others are mobile phones, game consoles, and computer software. The customers form a network, where the size of the...

This paper studies the strategic value of delegation in dynamic interactions, where principals provide managers with intertemporal incentives in order to obtain a competitive advantage. While direct management offers intertemporal commitment opportunities, the separation of ownership from...

This paper studies imperfect price competition between two intermediaries in an electronic business-to-business matching market with indirect network externalities. The intermediaries differ with regard to their ownership structure: an independent third party incumbent marketplace competes with...

Cournot oligopoly has been studied almost exclusively under the implicit assumption of perfectly competitive factor markets. However,oligopolistic firms procure often factors of production from imperfectly competitive markets. Okuguchi(1998,2000) has analyzed Cournot oligopoly under the...