The conventional wisdom is that the formation of patent pools is welfare enhancing when patents are complementary, since the pool avoids a double-marginalization problem associated with independent licensing. This conventional wisdom relies on the effects that pooling has on downstream prices....

While many companies use algorithms to optimize their pricing, additional human oversight and price interventions are widespread. Human intervention can correct algorithmic flaws and introduce private information into the pricing process, but it may also be based on less sophisticated pricing...

This paper analyzes the impact on mobile telephony diffusion patterns of the two predominant payment regimes, calling party pays (CPP) and receiving party pays (RPP), for mobile termination services. By applying instrumental variable techniques to panel data we account for a possible...

This paper analyses the extent of inter-format retail competition between supermarkets, discounters and drugstores in Germany, using data from the German market for diapers. We estimate a random coefficient logit model at the individual household level. Based on consumer substitution patterns,...

Research on bargaining power in vertical relationships is scarce. It remains particularly unclear which factors drive bargaining power between the two negotiating parties in a vertical structure. We use a demand model where the consumer demand determines the total pie of industry profits....

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 analyzes the convergence process of Central-West European wholesale electricity markets from 2004 to the beginning of 2011. Jevon's law of price indifference is scrutinized using price correlation, parametric and nonparametric tests of price-differences and cointegration analysis. As...

Unlike most retrospective merger studies that only focus on price effects, we also estimate the impact of a merger on product variety. We use an original dataset on Dutch supermarkets to assess the effect of a merger that was conditionally approved by the Dutch Competition Authority (ACM) on...

Asymmetric information is a classic example of market failure that undermines the efficiency associated with perfectly competitive market outcomes: the "lemons" market. Credible certification, that substantiates unobservable characteristics of products that consumers value, is often considered a...

We study firms' incentives to acquire private information in a setting where subsequent competition leads to firms' later signaling their private information to rivals. Due to signaling, equilibrium prices are distorted, and so while firms benefit from obtaining more precise private information,...