Should the government procure equipment for its agencies or let them run their own procurment auctions? Suppose the agency has private information about product quality, but is inclined to favour local suppliers. Decentralization saves bureaucracy and "agency costs", but leads to biased...

Should the government procure equipment for its agencies or let them run their own procurement auctions? Suppose the agency has private information about product quality, but is inclined to favor local suppliers. Decentralization saves bureaucracy and "agency costs" (costs tied to truthful...

In procurement auctions with a fixed number of bidders there is a tradeoff between cost efficiency and rent extraction. An optimal mechanism, therefore, entails distortions of effort. If potential suppliers must sink an entry investment before they can participate in the auction, then decreasing...

A multinational enterprise is subject to taxation by two jurisdictions who compete to capture its rents, while being aware that the firm also has investment options outside these jurisdictions. The firm has private informatio about its efficiency. We show that a higher outside option for the...

Consider an auction in which potential bidders must sink an entry investment before learning their values. Suppose the auction designer can make the bidders learn their value before entry. Such early information will induce screening of high-value bidders, and it will give rise to information...

In a non-cooperative oligopoly model where firms use simple linear prices, Klemperer (1987) has shown that the existence of consumers’ switching costs may generate monopoly like prices, and thereby create substantial loss in welfare. We show that when allowing firms to use two-part tariffs,...

According to the new European telecom regulation, incumbent operators are required to provide access to such bottlenecks on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. We explore different interpretations of this general rule in a model in which the bottleneck can be used by external (to the...

The general opinion among power industry representatives and electricity market analysts is that the Nordic electricity market has worked well. The purpose of this paper is to explore why the Nordic electricity market has performed well and to consider to what extent the Nordic experiences are...

We study the relationship between regulatory regimes and pharmaceutical firms’ pricing strategies using a unique policy experiment from Norway, which in 2003 introduced a reference price (RP) system called “index pricing” for a sub-sample of off-patent pharmaceuticals, replacing the...

We consider a therapeutic market with potentially three pharmaceutical firms. Two of the firms offer horizontally differentiated brand-name drugs. One of the brand-name drugs is a new treatment under patent protection that will be introduced, if the profits are sufficient to cover the entry...