We report experimental results on exclusive dealing inspired by the literature on "naked exclusion.'' Our key findings are: First, exclusion of a more efficient entrant is a widespread phenomenon in lab markets. Second, allowing incumbents to discriminate between buyers increases exclusion rates...

We consider a vertically related industry and analyze how the total harm due to a price increase upstream is distributed over downstream firms and final consumers. For this purpose, we develop a general model without making specific assumptions regarding demand, costs, or the mode of...

We analyze exclusive contracts between health care providers and insurers in a model where some consumers choose to stay uninsured. In case of a monopoly insurer, exclusion of a provider changes the distribution of consumers who choose not to insure. Although the foreclosed care provider remains...

This Paper introduces optimal competition: the best form of competition in an industry that a competition authority can achieve (given the information constraint that it cannot observe firms’ efficiency levels). We show that the optimal competition outcome in an industry becomes more...

For many goods (such as experience goods or addictive goods), consumers' preferences may change over time. In this paper, we examine a monopolist's optimal pricing schedule when current consumption can affect a consumer's valuation in the future and valuations are unobservable. We assume that...

This paper analyzes optimal procurement mechanisms in a setting where the procurement agency has incomplete information concerning the firms' cost functions and cares about quality as well as price. Low type firms are cheaper than high type firms in providing low quality but more expensive when...

In countries like the US and the Netherlands health insurance is provided by private firms. These private firms can offer both individual and group contracts. The strategic and welfare implications of such group contracts are not well understood. Using a Dutch data set of about 700 group health...

This Paper introduces a new way to measure competition based on firms' profits. Within a general model, we derive conditions under which this measure is monotone in competition, where competition can be intensified both through a fall in entry barriers and through more aggressive interaction...

We study optimal risk adjustment in imperfectly competitive health insurance markets when high-risk consumers are less likely to switch insurer than low-risk consumers. First, we find that insurers still have an incentive to select even if risk adjustment perfectly corrects for cost differences...

The Profit Elasticity (PE) is a new competition measure introduced in Boone (2008). So far, there was no direct proof that this measure can identify regimes of competition empirically. This paper focuses on this issue using data of Genesove and Mullin (1998) in which different regimes of...