We develop a model in which two insurers and two health care providers compete for a fixed mass of policyholders. Insurers compete in premium and offer coverage against financial consequences of health risk. They have the possibility to sign agreements with providers to establish a health care...

Considering a vertical structure with perfectly competitive upstream firms that deliver a homogenous good to a differentiated retail duopoly, we show that upstream fixed costs may help to monopolize the downstream market. We find that downstream prices increase in upstream firms'fixed costs when...

We develop a model of interlocking bilateral relationships between upstream manufacturers that produce differentiated goods and downstream retailers that compete imperfectly for consumers. Contract offers and acceptance decisions are private information to the contracting parties. We show that...

While vertical integration is traditionally seen as a solution to the hold-up problem, this paper highlights instead that it can generate hold-up problems — for rivals. We first consider a successive duopoly where competition among suppliers eliminates any risk of hold-up; downstreamfirms thus...

We show that collective bargaining can enhance retailers’ buying power vis-àvis their suppliers. We consider a model of vertically related markets, in which an upstream leader faces a competitive fringe of less efficient suppliers and negotiates secretly with several firms that compete in a...

Law enforcement is decentralized. It is so despite documented interjurisdictional externalities which would justify its centralization. To explain this fact, we construct a political economy model of law enforcement. Under decentralization, law enforcement in each region is in accord with the...

More and more academic journals adopt an open-access policy, by which articles are accessible free of charge, while publication costs are recovered through author fees. We study the consequences of this open access policy on a journal’s quality standard. If the journal’s objective was to...

The paper makes two related contributions. First, and in contrast with the rich body of literature on collusion with (mainly perfect) substitutes, it derives general results on the sustainability of tacit coordination for a class of nested demand functions that allows for the full range between...

A major policy issue in standard setting is that patents that are ex-ante not that important may, by being included into a standard, become standard-essential patents (SEPs). In an attempt to curb the monopoly power that they create, most standard-setting organizations require the owners of...

Low-powered contracts do not provide proper incentives to reduce cost; still empirical studies show that they are quite pervasive in public and private procurement. This paper argues that low-powered contracts arise due to a free-riding problem when the contractor enjoys economies of scale/scope...