This article examines how firms facing volatile input prices and holding some degree of market power in their product market link their risk management and production or pricing strategies. This issue is relevant in many industries ranging from manufacturing to energy retailing, where risk...

This article examines how …rms facing volatile input prices and holding some degree of market power in their product market link their risk management and their production or pricing strategies. This issue is relevant in many industries ranging from manufacturing to energy retailing, where risk...

Stated preference (SP) surveys attempt to obtain monetary values for non-market goods that reflect individuals’ “true” preferences. Numerous empirical studies suggest that monetary values from SP studies are sensitive to survey design and so may not reflect respondents’ true preferences....

The Pareto principle is often viewed as a mild requirement compatible with a variety of value judgements. In particular, it is generally thought that it can accommodate different degress of inequality aversion. We show that this is generally not true in time consistent intertemporal models where...

The paper develops a framework combining a model of rational behaviour under dietary constraints, an epidemiological model of diet-related mortality, and a life-cycle-analysis model of environmental impact, which permits the ex-ante assessment of dietary recommendations in multiple...

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...

In a two-stage game with three firms and two countries, we study the profitability of a domestic merger in the context of an international oligopoly game with differentiated products and in a strategic trade policy environment. In contrast to a completely unregulated economy, we show that 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...

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...

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...