In markets where sellers' marginal costs of production have a common component, they have informational advantage over buyers regarding those costs. This information asymmetry between sellers and buyers is especially relevant in markets where buyers have to uncover prices through costly search....

This paper provides a novel rationale for the regulation of market size when heterogeneous firms compete. A regulator seeks to maximize total welfare by choosing the number of firms allowed to enter the market, e.g. by issuing a certain number of licenses. Opening up the market for more firms...

Industrial prices of goods and services are a function of costs of production and of the mark-up that firms apply on those costs. If these prices relate to goods that are traded internationally, they will also be influenced by the price at which those goods are exchanged in international...

This paper considers a market in which only the incumbent's quality is publicly known. The entrant's quality is observed by the incumbent and some fraction of informed consumers. This leads to price signalling rivalry between the duopolists, because the incumbent gains and the entrant loses when...

Imposing a minimum quality standard (MQS) is conventionally regarded as harmful if firms compete in quantities. This, however, ignores dynamic effects. We show that an MQS can hinder collusion, resulting in dynamic welfare gains that reduce and may even outweigh the usual static losses. Verdicts...

We study games with utilitarian preferences: the sum of individual utility functions is a generalized ordinal potential for the game. It turns out that generically, any finite game with a potential, ordinal potential, or generalized ordinal potential is better reply equivalent to a game with...

We study non-cooperative link formation games in which players have to decide how much to invest in relationships with other players. A link between two players is formed, if and only if both make a positive investment. The cost of forming a link can be interpreted as the opportunity cost of...

We study non-cooperative link formation games in which players have to decide how much to invest in relationships with other players. The relationship between equilibrium strategies and network centrality measures are investigated in games where there is a common valuation of players as friends....

We study markets for sensitive personal information. An agent wants to communicate with another party but any revealed information can be intercepted and sold to a third party whose reaction harms the agent. The market for information induces an adverse sorting effect, allocating the information...

This paper studies the welfare effects of wholesale price discrimination between downstream firms operating under different regulatory systems. I model a monopolistic intermediate good market in which production cost differences between downstream firms may be due to regulatory or technological...