Traditional economic theory of collusion assumed that cartels are inherently unstable, and yet some manage to operate for years or even decades. While the literature has presented several determinants of cartel stability, the vast majority focuses on firms as entities, even though cartels are...

The question how mergers affect innovation has gained prominence in a number of recent merger cases. Accounting for the likely effects of mergers on innovation is difficult for a number of reasons though. First of all, the relationship between market concentration and innovation is far from...

Markets, where buyers and sellers can exchange goods and services, are key to the division of labor, specialisation, the realisation of economies of scale and scope and, therefore, economic prosperity, growth and development. The better markets work the easier it is to reap the benefits of...

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...

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...

This paper explores the effects that collusion can have in newspaper markets where firms compete for advertising as well as for readership. We compare three modes of competition: i) competition in the advertising and the reader market, ii) semi-collusion over advertising (with competition in the...

This paper summarizes the economic principles of European state aid control. We start with a discussion of the economic justification for state aid control, including the definition of state aid in European law and exceptions to the general ban of state aid. We then explore the motives for...

It is a persistent phenomenon in many societies that a large proportion of alcohol consumption takes place in company of other people. While the phenomenon of social or public drinking is well discussed in disciplines as social psychology and anthropology, economists have paid little attention...

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...