This paper offers a new and broad insight into the landscape of German cartels, utilizing a unique dataset of all illegal horizontal cartels detected by the German Federal Cartel Office (FCO) between 1958 and 2004 and all legal cartels authorized during the same time period. We also provide the...

This paper explores how consumers react towards price differentiation between on-net and off-net calls in mobile telecommunications - a pricing policy that is common in many mobile telecommunications markets. Based on a survey of 1044 students we demonstrate that some consumers may suffer from a...

In this paper we investigate the existence of a two-tier medical system in the German acute care hospital sector using data from a survey of 483 German hospitals. The focus of our analysis lies on the impact of hospital concentration on the probability of discrimination of patients with...

This paper investigates why consumers choose calling plans that are not always cost-minimizing. Our approach is twofold: we account for general difficulties facing a tariff choice, as well as for biased preferences. We provide evidence from an experiment among German university students and...

We investigate whether outside board memberships of CEOs signal expertise or entrenchment. The analysis is based on panel data of the largest German companies covering the period from 1996 to 2008. Supporting the entrenchment hypothesis, our analysis reveals that firms having a CEO with one or...

Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) increasingly gain in importance with respect to the supply of pharmaceutical products and frequently use multiple or exclusive rebate contracts to exercise market power. Based on a Hotelling model of horizontal and vertical product differentiation, we...

This note analyzes the existence of a possible media bias by determining the impact of automobile manufactures' advertisements on the probability that German car magazines review their products. By accounting for possible endogeneity, we find a positive impact of advertising volumes on test...

The focus of this paper is the empirical evaluation of the German Accelerated Vehicle Retirement program, that was implemented in January 2009 to stimulate automobile consumption. To adress this question a monthly dataset of new car registrations owned by private consumers from March 2001 until...

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...

Academic consulting is recognised as an important and effective means of knowledge transfer with the public and private sectors. These interactions with external sectors offer opportunities for research application but also raise concerns over their potentially negative consequences for academic...