We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand,...

We examine the relationship between concentration and price dispersion using variation induced by a merger in the Canadian mortgage market. Since interest rates are determined through a search and negotiation process, consolidation weakens consumers' bargaining positions. We use reduced-form...

The cornerstone of cartel enforcement in the United States and elsewhere is a commitment to the lenient prosecution of early confessors. A burgeoning gametheoretical literature is ambiguous regarding the impacts of leniency. I develop a theoretical model of cartel behavior that provides...

This paper reports the results of an experiment on exclusive contracts. We replicate the strategic environment described by Rasmusen, Ramseyer, and Wiley (1991) and Segal and Whinston (2000). Our findings are as follows. First, when the buyers can communicate, discrimination raises the...

We analyze firms that compete by means of exclusive contracts and market-share discounts (conditional on the seller's share of customers' total purchases). With incomplete information about demand, firms have a unilateral incentive to use these contractual arrangements to better extract buyers'...

We study the effects of antitrust policy in industries with continual innovation. Antitrust policies that restrict incumbent behavior toward new entrants may have conflicting effects on innovation incentives, raising the profits of new entrants, but lowering those of continuing incumbents. We...

We analyze the optimal policy of an antitrust authority towards horizontal mergers when merger proposals are endogenous and firms choose among alternative mergers. In our model, the optimal policy of an antitrust authority that seeks to maximize expected consumer surplus imposes a tougher...