In this paper we analyze firms' ability to tacitly collude on pricesin an infinitely repeated duopoly game of vertical productdifferentiation. We show that firms collude if and only if their discountfactor is high enough, i.e. if they value future profits sufficiently. We alsoshow that a lower...

This study analyses the evolution of market power in the banking sectors of the European Union based on the estimation of Lerner indices. Using a panel of 18,810 observations of the banking industries of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom during the period 1992-99, the results...

Financial integration in Europe should affect the competition between markets and intermediaries and generate a convergence of both interest rates and margins among the different countries. This paper analyses the evolution of the convergence in interest rates and the level of competition and...

Competition has long been regarded as productivity enhancing. Understanding the mechanism by which competition affects innovation and productivity is therefore an important topic for economic policy. The main contribution of this paper is to disentangle the relationship between competition and...

Suppose that a group of individuals owns collectively a technology which produces a consumptiongood by means of a (possibly heterogeneous) input. A sharing rule associates input contributionswith a vector of consumptions that are technologically feasible. We show that the set of...

This paper analyzes the possibility of irnplementing stable outcomes for marriage markets. Our first result shows a contradiction between the use of stable mechanisins and the hypotesis of agents' behaviour consiclered in the Nash equilibriurn concept . We analyze the possibility of...

In this paper we study a situation were the planner cannot commit to a mechanism and the outcome function is substituted by the planner herself. We assume 1) agents have complete information and play simultaneously; and 2) given the messages announced by the agents, the planner reacts in an...

In this paper, we show that downstream mergers increase the incentives of an up-stream firm to invest in cost-reducing R&D. The upstream firm revenues increase with industry profits, which in turn increase with concentration downstream and this explains the positive link between concentration...

In the context of the recent electricity market reforms in Europe and the US, we evaluate the performance of the Spanish pool. Our method is not based on price-cost estimates but rather on the different behavior of operators with higher market power as compared to the behavior of more...

This paper analyses the evolution of competition in the Mexican banking system in the period 1993-2005, a period of deregulation, liberalization and consolidation of the sector. For this purpose we use two indicators of competition from the theory of industrial organization (the Lerner index and...