This paper studies the ambiguous welfare effects of compatibility in a platform market with endogenous content provision. Compatibility can be particularly harmful if it leads to reduced content but can be beneficial if content is sufficiently increased.

This paper analyzes the unilateral choices of application compatibility by platforms and the endogenous affiliations of two different groups (content providers and users). We find a novel result that for both platforms to unilaterally choose application compatibility is not an equilibrium unless...

In this paper we show that, in the presence of buyer and seller power, a monopolist can enter into a costly contractual relationship with a low-quality supplier with the sole intention of improving its bargaining position relative to a high-quality supplier, without ever selling the good...

In the dominant firm-competitive fringe model, where firms purchase input from a common supplier via two-part tariff contracts, we demonstrate that countervailing power may be neutral. Unlike Chen (2003), more countervailing power may not lead to lower consumer prices.

This paper demonstrates that the standard conclusions regarding the comparison of Cournot and Bertrand competition are reversed in a vertically related market with upstream monopoly and trading via two-part tariffs. In such a market, downstream Cournot competition yields higher output, lower...

Examining a standard monopolistic competition model with unspecified utility/cost functions, we find necessary and sufficient conditions on their elasticities for welfare losses to arise from trade or market expansion. Two numerical examples explain the losses (under unrealistic elasticities).

It is usually believed that the presence of a labour union makes firms as well as consumers worse off by increasing wages compared to the situation with no labour union. We show that the presence of a labour union may increase the incentive for entry and may also make consumers better off...

We examine the impact of (and links between) two types of economic integration on the stability of multimarket collusion when firms interact in quantities in segmented markets: (1) multilateral trade liberalization, captured by a reduction of trade costs across all markets; and (2) preferential...

We explore asymmetries in the way consumers sample prices in a simple sequential search framework. In equilibrium, the price distribution of a firm catering to more local consumers first-order stochastically dominates that of its rival. Prices rise in the degree of asymmetry.

We examine the average equilibrium price when quantity setting oligopolies price discriminate. It is known that for the price discrimination extension of Cournot competition the average price is independent of the extent of price discrimination whenever the demand is linear. We show that this...