A well established belief both in the game-theoretic IO and in policy debates is that market concentration facilitates collusion. We show that this piece of conventional wisdom relies upon the assumption of profit-seeking behaviour, for it may be reversed when firms pursue other plausible goals....

We use data from approximately 50,000 crowdfunding projects to assess the relative funding performance of for-profit and non-profit campaigns. We find that non-profit projects are significantly more likely to reach their minimum funding goals and that they receive more money from the average...

We show that, in general, consistent estimates of cost pass-through are not obtained from reduced-form regressions of price on cost. We derive a formal approximation for the bias that arises even under standard orthogonality conditions. We provide guidance on the conditions under which bias may...

The paper shows that producer-owned firms are more efficient in quality provision than investor-owned firms if input quality is observable, while they are less efficient when the input quality is unobservable and the size of the organization is large.

This paper studies the impact of relative performance evaluation (RPE) on the equilibrium locations in a Hotelling model with quadratic transportation cost. It is shown that equilibrium location varies from maximum differentiation to minimum differentiation, depending upon the relative strength...

Random choices of prices and product characteristics can be used by a contestable monopolist to deter entry and fully extract the monopoly rent. We develop this idea in a model of Bertrand price competition. In equilibrium, one firm enters the market and makes choices that are unpredictable to...

The upper tail of the size distribution of websites follows a power law with slope close to one (Zipf’s law). This finding is robust to measuring website size by unique visitors and page views, and holds for the United States, Germany, and the world. Web traffic in China has less support for a...

We revisit the effects of switching costs on dynamic competition. We consider stationary Markovian strategies, with market shares being the state variable, and characterize a relatively simple Markov Perfect pricing equilibrium at which there is switching by some consumers at all times. For the...

This paper investigates the size of penalties required to deter cartel formation. Allowing the penalty to be increasing in duration within the infinitely repeated game framework, penalties do not need to be as severe as previous research would suggest.

This paper studies whether bank competition affects growth of non-banking industries. We find that non-cooperative bank competition and stability promote industrial growth robustly. Bank concentration may also affect growth positively; the latter effect increases for higher levels of competition.