We investigate how various institutional settings affect a network provider’s incentives to invest in infrastructure quality. Under reasonable assumptions on demand, investment incentives turn out to be smaller under vertical separation than under vertical integration, though we also provide...

We examine the competitive effects of the vertical integration of gasoline refineries and retailers in the U.S. Adapting the first-order condition approach of static oligopoly games to the analysis of vertically related oligopolies, we develop a novel framework for directly evaluating the...

We provide a framework for analyzing bilateral mergers when there is two-sided asymmetric information about firms’ types. We show that there is always a "no-merger" equilibrium where firms do not consent to a merger, irrespective of their type. There may also be a "cut-off" equilibrium if the...