It is well-known that switching costs may facilitate monopoly pricing in a market with price competition between two suppliers of a homogenous good, provided the switching cost is above some critical level. With heterogeneous consumers monopoly pricing entails second degree price dierentiotation...

We examine how a merger affects wages of unionized labour and, in turn, the profitability of a merger under both Cournot and Bertrand competition. If unions are plant-specific, we find that a merger is more profitable than in a corresponding model with exogenous wages. In contrast to the...

The integration of the power markets in Norway and Sweden in 1996 significantly constrained the major power companies' ability to exercise market power within their national borders. In recent years, however margers and reciprocal acquisition of shares have reduced the number of independent...

The received literature concludes that if scale economies are absent, mergers are often unprofitable under Cornot competition, but always profitable under Bertrand. In a linear demand model with three firms initially, where there are two merger candidates, we show that results will change if we...

In this paper, we study the effects of introducing endogenous costs in a Tullock model of rent-seeking. We show that unions can be efficiency improving, and that the firms' level of effort depends more critically upon the number of firms participating in the contests when unions are present. We...

Conventional economic theory stipulates that output in Cournot competition is too low relative to that which is attained in perfect competition. We revisit this result in a General Cournot-competitive Equilibrium model with two industries that dier only in terms of productivity. We show that in...

In this paper we set out to investigate the price and quantity fluctuations in Western Denmark, which took place during the winter season 2002-2003. This was a period, which exhibited critical supply conditions in the Nordic area due to a shortage of hydropower. On average, the market in Western...

We study the competitive effects of restricting direct access to secondary care by gatekeeping, focusing on the informational role of gatekeeping general practitioners (GPs). We consider a secondary care market with two hospitals choosing the quality and specialisation of their care. GPs...

We analyze the dynamic interaction between imitation and myopic optimization in an environment of changing marginal payoffs. Focusing on finite irreducible environments, we unfold a trade-off between the degree of interaction and the size of environmental shocks. The optimizer outperforms the...

We analyse how equilibrium locations in location-price games à la Hotelling are affected when firms acquire inputs through bilateral monopoly relations with suppliers. Assuming a duopoly downstream market, we consider the case of two independent input suppliers bargaining with both downstream...