Since the introduction of a formal commitments procedure in EU an- titrust policy (Article 9 of Council Regulation 1/2003), the European Commission has extensively settled cases of alleged anticompetitive practices. In this paper, we use a formal model of law enforcement (Be- bchuk, 1984; Shavell,...

We provide an extensive and general investigation of the effecst on industry performance - profits, social welfare and price-cost margins - of exogenously changing the number of firms in Cournot markets. This includes an in-depth exploration of the well-known trade-off between competition and...

This paper faces two questions concerning Joint Ventures (JV) agreements. First, we study how the partners contribution affect the creation and the profit sharing of a JV when partners' effort is not observable. Then, we see whether such agreements are easier to enforce when the decision on JV...

The welfare impact of a merger involves the market power offense and the efficiency defense. Salant et al. (1983) show that mergers among symmetric firms are unprofitable except for monopolization. We characterize the limit to this merger paradox in a simple linear Cournot oligopoly with...

Many industries are made of a few big firms, which are able to manipulate the market outcome, and of a host of small businesses, each of which has a negligible impact on the market. We provide a general equilibrium framework that encapsulates both market structures. Due to the higher toughness...

We investigate the effects of market transparency on prices in the Bertrand duopoly model for both the cases of strategic complementarities and strategic substitutes. For the former class of games “conventional wisdom” concerning prices is confirmed, since they decrease. The consumers are...

We propose a general model of monopolistic competition, which encompasses existing models while being flexible enough to take into account new demand and competition features. The basic tool we use to study the market outcome is the elasticity of substitution at a symmetric consumption pattern,...

Recent extensions of the standard Dixit-Stiglitz (1977) model, that go beyond the CES sub-utility assumption, while maintaining monopolistic competition, have mainly emphasized the role of iintrasectoral substitutability. We argue that introducing oligopolistic competition can be an alternative...

We propose a general model of monopolistic competition and derive a complete characterization of the market equilibrium using the concept of Relative Love for Variety. When the RLV increases with individual consumption, the market generates pro-competitive effects. When it decreases, the market...