Trade unions are often argued to cause allocative inefficiencies and to lower welfare. We analyze whether this evaluation is also justified in a Cournot-oligopoly with free but costly entry. If input markets are competitive and output per firm declines with the number of firms (business...

If an additional competitor reduces output per firm in a homogenous Cournot-oligopoly, market entry will be excessive. Taxes can correct the so-called business stealing externality. We investigate how evading a tax on operating profits affects the excessive entry prediction. Tax evasion raises...

We study a novel trade-off in market transparency regulation by estimating a structural model of the German retail gasoline market. Transparent environments enable easy price comparisons and match findings. Restricting transparency such that only the cheapest offers are shown induces firms to...

We adopt a framework of vertical differentiation (i.e. differentiation by quality) to study the issue of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). We develop a model of duopoly in a two‐country setting, in which firms choose the country of location, the level of CSR and finally compete in the...

We focus on four important features of mobile targeting. First, consumers' real-time locations are known to sellers. Second, location is not the only factor determining how responsive consumers are to discounts. Other factors such as age, income and occupation play a role, which are imperfectly...

It is increasingly observable that competitors in different industries share customer data, which can be used for targeted pricing. We propose a modified Hotelling model with two-dimensional consumer heterogeneity to analyze the incentives for such sharing and its ensuing welfare effects. We...

We investigate how firms' incentives to acquire customer data for targeted offers depend on its quality. A two-dimensional Hotelling model is proposed where consumers are heterogeneous both with respect to their locations and transportation cost parameters (flexibility). Firms have perfect data...

In this note we analyze the sustainability of collusion in a game of repeated interaction where firms can price discriminate among consumers based on two types of customer data. This work is related to Liu and Serfes (2007) and Sapi and Suleymanova (2013). Following Sapi and Suleymanova we...

We analyze how consumer myopia influences investment incentives into a technology that enables firms to track consumers' purchases and make targeted offers based on their preferences. In a two-period Hotelling setup firms may invest in customer-tracking technology. If a firm acquires the...

We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers' behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to the...