We study entry into the American sugar refining industry before World War I. We show that the price wars following two major entry episodes were predatory. Our proof is twofold: by direct comparison of price to marginal cost, and by construction of predicted competitive price cost margins that...

This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

Detailed notes on weekly meetings of the sugar refining cartel show how communication helps firms collude, and so highlight the deficiencies in the current formal theory of collusion. The Sugar Institute did not fix prices or output. Prices were increased by homogenizing business practices to...

We examine the institutional details of the school milk procurement process, bidding data, statements of dairy executives, and supply characteristics in Ohio during the 1980's. We compare the bidding behavior of a group of firms to a control group. We find that the behavior of each of the firms...

In 1990 the Federal Government included a Most Favored Customer (MFC) clause in the contract (OBRA 90) which would govern the prices paid to firms for pharmaceutical products supplied to Medicaid recipients. The firms had to give Medicaid their best (lowest) price in some cases, a percentage...

The one-shot nature of most theoretical models of strategic investment, especially those based on asymmetric information, limits our ability to test whether they can fit the data. We develop a dynamic version of the classic Milgrom and Roberts (1982) model of limit pricing, where a monopolist...

This paper develops and estimates a search and bargaining model designed to measure the welfare loss associated with frictions in oligopoly markets with negotiated prices. We use the model to quantify the consumer surplus loss induced by the presence of search frictions in the Canadian mortgage...

Media outlets are increasingly owned by conglomerates, inducing a conflict of interest: a media outlet can bias its coverage to benefit companies in the same group. We test for bias by examining movie reviews by media outlets owned by News Corp.—such as the Wall Street Journal—and by Time...

Standard policies to correct market power and selection can be misguided when these two forces co-exist. Using a calibrated model of employer-sponsored health insurance, we show that the risk adjustment commonly used by employers to offset adverse selection often reduces the amount of...

In The Antitrust Paradox, Robert Bork viewed most mergers as either competitively neutral or efficiency enhancing. In his view, only mergers creating a dominant firm or monopoly were likely to harm consumers. Bork was especially skeptical of oligopoly concerns resulting from mergers. In this...