It has been argued that having a contract market before the spot market enhances competition (Allaz and Vila, 1993). Taking into account the repeated nature of electricity markets, we check the robustness of the argument that the access to contract markets reduces the market power of generators....

We model networks of relational (or implicit)contracts, exploring how sanctioning power and equilibrium conditions change under different network configurations and information transmission technologies. In our model, relations are the links, and the value of the network lies in its ability to...

This paper examines the relation between prices in conventional stores and on the Internet. Main results from the theoretical analysis are i) we expect a discrete fall in prices in conventional stores as the share of the population with access to Internet reaches a critical level, ii) the...

The literature on deregulated electricity markets generally assumes available capacities to be given. In contrast, this paper studies a model where firms precommit to capacity levels before competing in a uniform price auction. The analysis sheds light on recent empirical findings that firms use...

Hedging risks is an important rationale for the existence of forward markets. However, Allaz and Vila (1993) show that duopolists can also have a strategic motive to sell forward, irrespective of exogenous uncertainties. Moreover, in their model the possibility of forward trading increases...

This paper provides an empirical examination of third-degree price discrimination in the Swedish newspaper industry. The results show that price discrimination is more prevalent in competitive markets and among newspapers with low market shares. This supports predictions from recent theoretical...

For Swedish newspaper firms, a market with high switching costs, the subscription market, and a market with low switching costs, the advertising market, are of approximately equal importance. When Sweden enters a deep recession, we find that liquidity constraints influence the pricing decision...

To the surprise of many, price deviations between markets characterized by imperfect competition have often been little affected by lower transport costs. In a Cournot model we show that if firms' decisions to segment markets are endogenous, then lower transport costs are, in many cases,...

In the text-book model of dynamic Bertrand competition, competing firms meet the same demand function every period. This is not a satisfactory model of the demand side if consumers can make intertemporal substitution between periods. Each period then leaves some residual demand to future...

For finite dimensional factor models, the paper studies general quadratic term structures. These term structures include as special cases the affine term structures and the Gaussian quadratic term structures, previously studied in the literature. We show, however, that there are other,...