We analyze the economic consequences of strategic delegation of the right to decide between public or private provision of governmental service and/or the authority to negotiate and renegotiate with the chosen service provider. Our model encompass both bureaucratic delegation from a government...

Competing firms often have the possibility to jointly determine the magnitude of consumers' switching costs. Examples include compatibility decisions and the option of introducing number portability in telecom and banking. We put forward a model where firms jointly decide to reduce switching...

EU Merger Control Regulation No 4064/89 tended to rely on a dominance test, based on the market share of undertakings, to indicate the level and potential changes in market power. The use of such in differentiated product industries is questionable. New EC Merger Regulation No 139/2004...

We estimate the cost of transporting corn and the resulting degree of spatial differentiation among downstream firms that buy corn from upstream farmers and examine whether such differentiation softens competition enabling buyers to exert market power (defined as the ability to pay a price for...

We study how domestic content requirements in Free Trade Areas (FTAs) affect market power and market structure in concentrated intermediate goods markets. We show that content requirements increase oligopolistic markups beyond the level that would obtain under an equivalent import tariff, and we...

Two duopolists compete in price on the market for a homogeneous product. They can 'profile' consumers, i.e., identify their valuations with some probability. If both firms can profile consumers but with different abilities, then they achieve positive expected profits at equilibrium. This...

We consider a labor market with search frictions in which workers make multiple applications and firms can post and commit to general mechanisms that may be conditioned both on the number of applications received and on the number of offers received by its candidate. When the contract space...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms that face search complementarities in the formation of vendor contracts. Search complementarities amplify small differences in productivity among firms. Market concentration fosters monopsony power in the labor...