In several European merger cases competition authorities have demanded that the merging firm auctions off virtual capacity. The buyer of virtual capacity receives an option on an amount of output at a pre-specified price, typically equal to marginal cost. This output is sold in the market in...

We analyze competition between data intermediaries collecting information on consumers, which they sell to firms for price discrimination purposes. We show that competition between data intermediaries benefits consumers by increasing competition between firms, and by reducing the amount of...

Asymmetric information in procurement entails double marginalization. The phenomenon is most severe when the buyer has all the bargaining power at the production stage, while it vanishes when the buyer and suppliers' weights are balanced. Vertical integration eliminates double marginalization...

Using data from the US automobile market, we empirically examine the link between competition and innovation. Consistent with a large literature, we use patent counts as a measure of innovation. The combination of the US market's economic importance, market dynamics, and the significant...

While price-fixing cartel prosecutions have received significant attention, the policy determinants and the political preferences that guide such antitrust prosecutions remain understudied. We empirically examine the intertemporal shifts in U.S. antitrust cartel prosecutions during the period...

We study an infinitely repeated oligopoly game in which firms compete on quantity and one of them is capacity constrained. We show that collusion sustainability is non-monotonic in the size of the capacity constrained firm, which has little incentive to deviate from a cartel. We also present...

This paper scrutinizes the effects of investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS) and national treatment provisions in a two-period model where foreign investment is subject to domestic regulation and a holdup problem. It shows that ISDS can mitigate the holdup problem and increases aggregate...

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset....