This paper discusses the incentive to bundle when consumer valuations are non-additive and/or when products are supplied by separate sellers.  Whether integrated or separate, a firm has an incentive to introduce a bundle discount when demand for the bundle is more elastic than the overall...

The most important issues in auction design are the traditional concerns of competition policy-preventing collusive, predatory, and entry deterring behaviour. Ascending and uniform-price auctions are particularly vulnerable to these problems (we discuss radiospectrum and football TV-rights...

One of the most controversial questions in current competition policy is when, if ever, should competition law require a firm with market power to share its property, notably intellectual property, with its rivals?  And if supply is required, on what terms?  These questions are discussed with...

This paper analyses how competition over rebates for customer loyalty across product lines affects firms` pricing and consumers generally. If buyers incur firm specific costs or have shop specific tastes then competitive loyalty discounts lower consumer surplus overall and raise profits - the...

The paper offers an economic appraisal of selected aspects of EC law and policy towards abuse of dominance (Article 82). After a brief discussion of thresholds for dominance, five theories of exclusionary harm to compeptition are outlined, concerning: predatory pricing, partial exclusion to...

The Sotheby`s/Christie`s price-fixing scandal that ended in the public trial of Alfred Taubman provides a unique window on a number of key economic and antitrust policy issues related to the use of the auction system. The trial provided detailed evidence as to how the price fixing worked, and...

Mixed bundling in imperfectly competitive industries causes some prices to rise and others to fall. This paper studies under what conditions mixed bundling works for or against the consumer interest. We find that if buyers incur firm specific costs or have shop specific tastes then competitive...

We consider an observer who makes a finite number of observations of an industry producing a homogeneous good, where each observation consists of the market price and firm specific production quantities.  We develop a revealed preference test (in the form of a linear program) for the hypothesis...

We study price competition between firms over public list or posted prices when a fraction of consumers (termed 'bargainers') can subsequently receive discounts with some probability.  Such stochastic discounts are a feature of markets in which some consumers bargain explicitly; of markets in...

This paper examines the operation of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) in a Cournot oligopoly.  We study the impact of the ETS on industry output, price, costs, emissions, and profits.  In particular, we develop formulae for the number of emissions permits that have to be freely allocated to...