Triggered by the concentration process in the electricity and gas markets, the land of Hesse proposes to give the German cartel office power to divest dominant firms or oligopolies if this is necessary to restore competition. The paper shows that the reform would be in line with constitutional...

Traditionally, there have been two separate telecommunications networks, one based on switches, the other based on routers. The switched network basically carried voice. The packet switched network basically carried data. Now voice is about to go packet switched too. Ultimately, both networks...

Competition between parallel infrastructures incorporates opposing welfare effects. The gain from reduced deadweight loss might be outweighed by the inefficient duplication of an existing infrastructure. Using data from broadband internet access for Western Europe 2000-2004, this paper...

We examine the persistence of monopolies in markets with innovations when the outcome of research is uncertain. We show that for low success probabilities of research, the incumbent can seldom preempt the potential entrant. Then the efficiency effect outweighs the replacement effect. It is vice...

The paper provides a speci?cation of belief systems for models of large economies with anonymity in which aggregate states depend only on cross-section distributions of types. For belief systems satisfying certain conditions of mutual absolute continuity, the paper gives a necessary and...

We modify the principal-agent model with moral hazard by assuming that the agent is expectation-based loss averse according to Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The optimal contract is a binary payment scheme even for a rich performance measure, where standard preferences predict a fully...

By using general information structures and precision criteria based on the dispersion of conditional expectations, we study how oligopolists’ information acquisition decisions may change the effects of information sharing on the consumer surplus. Sharing information about individual cost...

We consider a principal-agent model with moral hazard where the agent’s knowledge about the performance measure is ambiguous and he is averse towards ambiguity. We show that the principal may optimally provide no incentives or contract only on a subset of all informative performance measures....

We study a dynamic model of team production with moral hazard. We show that the players begin to invest effort only shortly before the time limit when the reward for solving the task is shared equally. We explore how the team can design contracts to mitigate this form of procrastination and show...

Neeman (2004) and Heifetz and Neeman (2006) have shown that, in auctions with incomplete information about payoffs, full surplus extraction is only possible if agents’ beliefs about other agents are fully informative about their own payoff parameters. They argue that the set of...