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...

We consider a simple two period model where consumers have different switching costs. Before the market opens, there was an incumbent who sold to all consumers. We identify the equilibrium both with Stackelberg and Bertrand competition and show how the presence of low switching cost consumers...

We study how the presence of a news aggregator affects quality choices of newspapers competing on the Internet. To provide a microfoundation for the role of the aggregator, we build a model of multiple issues where each newspaper chooses quality on each issue. This model captures the...

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...

Two-period Cournot competition between n identical firms producing at constant marginal cost and able to store before selling has pure strategy Nash- perfect equilibria, in which some firms store to exert endogenously a leader- ship over rivals. The number of firms storing balances market share...

The recent subprime crisis and the ongoing Euro zone crisis have generated an enormous interest in the credit rating industry not only among economists but also among average citizens. As a consequence, we have seen an explosion of the economic literature on the industry. The objective of this...

This paper analyzes how the stability of the tacit cooperation within a fringe of sev- eral identical ?rms is a¤ected by the presence of a more e¢ cient ?rm which does not take part in their cooperative agreement. The model assumes that the ?rms of the fringe adopt ?stick and carrot?strategies...