Many countries with national health care providers and health insurances regulate the market for pharmaceuticals to steer drug demand and to control expenses. For example, they introduce reference pricing or tiered co-payments to enhance drug substitution and competition. Since 2006, Germany...

The German reserve power market was subject to important regulatory changes in recent years. A new market design was created by synchronization and interconnection of the four control areas. In this paper, we analyze whether or not the reforms led to lower prices for minute reserve power (MRP)....

This paper investigates the impact of four key economic variables on an expert firm's incentive to defraud its customers in a credence goods market: the level of competition, the expert firm's financial situation, its competence, and its reputational concerns. We use and complement the dataset...

Hospital markets are often characterised by price regulation and the existence of different ownership types. Using a Hotelling framework, this paper analyses the effect of heterogeneous objectives of the hospitals on quality differentiation, profits, and overall welfare in a price regulated...

This paper estimates demand elasticities for the Turkish mobile telecommunication market. In contrast to most other studies, firm level data is used to estimate dynamic panel data models including instrumental variable techniques. Both short- and long-run elasticities are calculated, yielding a...

We analyze competitions where the contestants evaluate each other and find the first contestant to be disadvantaged. We suspect that this is due to information diffusion, Bayesian belief updating taking place in course of the contest and initial uncertainty about a contestant's relative quality....

The strategy literature has found it difficult to differentiate between collusive and efficiencybased synergies in horizontal merger activity. We propose a theoretically-backed methodological approach to classify mergers that yields more information on merger types and merger effects, and that...

We propose a general framework to assess merger policy effectiveness based on standard oligopoly theory and stock market reactions. We focus on four different dimensions of effectiveness: 1) legal certainty, 2) decision errors, 3) reversion of anti-competitive rents, and 4) deterrence. We apply...

We show that choices in competitive behavior may entail a gender wage gap. In our experi ments, employees first choose a remuneration scheme (competitive tournament vs. piece rate) and then conduct a real-effort task. Employers know the pie size the employee has generated, the remuneration...

This paper summarizes the peculiarities of online markets and discusses recent antitrust cases related to online markets. Following a brief description of the online markets' characteristics and potential tendencies for concentration the paper first discusses the antitrust allegations and...