We examine the impact of the licensing policies of one or more upstream owners of essential intellectual property (IP hereafter) on the variety offered by a downstream industry, as well as on consumers and social welfare. When an upstream monopoly owner of essential IP increases the number of...

Two-period Cournot competition between n identical firms producing at constant marginal cost and able to store before selling has pure strategy Nash-perfect equilibria, in which some firms store to exert endogenously a leadership over rivals. The number of firms storing balances market share...

We consider a simple two period model where consumers have different switching costs. Before the market opens, there was an incumbent who sold to all consumers. We identify the equilibrium both with Stackelberg and Bertrand competition and show how the presence of low switching cost consumers...

We develop a model of interlocking bilateral relationships between upstream firms (manufacturers) that produce differentiated goods and downstream firms (retailers) that compete imperfectly for consumers. Contract offers and acceptance decisions are private information to the contracting...

The recent subprime crisis and the ongoing Euro zone crisis have generated an enormous interest in the credit rating industry not only among economists but also among average citizens. As a consequence, we have seen an explosion of the economic literature on the industry. The objective of this...

Two-period Cournot competition between n identical firms producing at constant marginal cost and able to store before selling has pure strategy Nash- perfect equilibria, in which some firms store to exert endogenously a leader- ship over rivals. The number of firms storing balances market share...

We show that the standard analysis of vertical relationships transposes directly to investment timing. Thus, when a firm undertaking a project requires an outside supplier (e.g. an equipment manufacturer) to provide it with a discrete input, and if the supplier has market power, investment...