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 shows how rules restricting common ownership of multiple media outlets affect both the magnitude and diversity of the ideological content of programming. While in most industries the assumption that firms maximize profits is quite reasonable, we assume that media owners derive utility...

Site licensing of e-journals has been revolutionizing the way academic information is distributed. However, many librarians are concerned about the possibility that publishers might abuse site licensing by practicing bundling. In this paper, we analyze how bundling affects journal pricing in the...

This paper examines empirically the players’ intrabrand vertical price control, interbrand horizontal pricing coordination, and their learning process to equilibrium in a rare natural experiment of supergame where a well defined simultaneous-move price setting stage game is repeated every...

We consider a model where bidders in an auction own passive partial claims over their rivals’ auction profits. While the cross ownership confers no ability to directly affect bidding behavior, the claims on rival profits dampen bidding competition. It is not uncommon for enforcement agencies...

Received literature have shown that if competing networks are restricted to linear and uniform pricing, high access charges can facilitate collusion; a result that breaks down if we allow for non-linear and discriminatory pricing, however. We show that by adding unbalanced calling pattern to the...

This paper first inverts a general class of matrices for solving Bertrand equilibria from arbitrary coalition structures in linear Bertand oligopolies. It then studies merger incentives and obtains two main results; 1) for any asymmetric costs, mergers of any size are profitable; 2) a merger will...

We introduce capacity constrained competition between market-making intermediaries in a model in which agents can choose between trading with intermediaries, joining a search market or remaining inactive. Recently, market-making by a monopolistic intermediary has been analyzed by Rust and Hall...

There are a lot of goods which have network externalities. While the number of players who have such a good is small, they may not get enough utility from the goods. That is, players have an incentive to delay their decision, when they purchase the goods with network externalities. Delay causes...

This paper develops a monopolistic competition model to study the characteristics of products, such as quality improvement and product diversity (function-specialization and individualization), and the division of labor in production. Different from the ordinary economic model, our utility...