We analyze the best price clauses (BPCs) of online travel agents (OTAs) using meta-search price data of nearly 30,000 hotels in different countries. We find that BPCs influence the pricing and availability of hotel rooms across online sales channels. In particular, hotels publish their offers...

Building on the seminal paper of Ordover, Saloner and Salop (1990), I study the role of reputation building on foreclosure in laboratory experiments. In one-shot interactions, upstream firms can choose to build a reputation by revealing their price history to the current upstream competitor. In...

We provide a novel intuition for why manufacturers restrict their retailers' ability to resell brandproducts online. Our approach builds on models of limited attention according to which pricedisparities across distribution channels guide a consumer's attention toward prices and lower...

When an upstream monopolist supplies several competing downstreamfirms, it may fail to monopolize the market because it is unable to commit not to behave opportunistically. We build on previous experimental studies of this well-known commitment problem by introducing communication. Allowing the...

We investigate whether online travel agents (OTAs) assign hotels worse positions in their search results if these set lower hotel prices at other OTAs or on their own websites. We formally characterize how an OTA can use such a strategy to reduce price differentiation across distribution...

This paper analyzes vertical integration incentives in a bilaterally duopolistic industry where input market outcomes are determined by bargaining. Vertical integration incentives are a combination of horizontal integration incentives up- and downstream and depend on the strength of...

We review the Chicago school's single monopoly profit theory whereby an upstream monopolist cannot increase its profits through vertical integration as it has sufficient market power anyways. In our model the dominant supplier has full bargaining power and uses observable two-part tariffs. We...

We analyze how consumer preferences for one-stop shopping affect the (Nash) bargaining relationships between a retailer and its suppliers. One-stop shopping preferences create 'demand complementarities' among otherwise independent products which lead to two opposing effects on upstream merger...

This paper analyzes vertical integration incentives in a bilaterally duopolistic industry where upstream producers bargain with downstream retailers on terms of supply. In the applied framework integration does not affect the total output produced, but it affects the distribution of rents among...

Consumers increasingly prefer to bundle their purchases into a single shopping trip, inducing complementaries between initially independent or substitutable goods. Taking this one-stop shopping behavior into account, we show that slotting fees may emerge as a result of a rent-shifting mechanism...