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...

This paper examines the stability of deterministic steady-states in a class of economies where the state -variable is one dimensional and where agents use Bayesian techniques to form expectations. Thr dynamics with learning are locally convergent if the prior mean is close to a stable perfect...

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 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 studies a class of NTU coalition formation games in which every player's payoff depends only on the members of her coalition. We identify four natural conditions on individuals' preferences and show that, under each condition, stable (core) allocations exists.

In this paper we present a general result on the convergence to an equilibrium of a class of dynamic adjustment procedures -which includes Gradient Systems and Best Reply Dynamics as special cases- when there are two players and strategy sets are one dimensional. We also show that there are no...