We illustrate conditions under which a trade platform selling its own products alongside third-party sellers benefits or harms consumers. This benefits consumers by lowering prices in a suite of models: a gatekeeper platform facing a competitive fringe of sellers, when fringe sellers also have...

We demonstrate how an incumbent producer of commodities can use cash-settled derivatives contracts to deter entry and extract rents from a potential competitor. By selling more derivatives than total demand, the producer commits to low prices and forces the entrant to price low upon entry. By...

This paper estimates an entry model to study the effect of exclusive dealing between Anheuser Busch and its distributors on rival brewers' entry decisions and consumer surplus. The entry model accounts for post-entry demand conditions and strategic spillover effects. I recover a brewer's fixed...

Antitrust scholars have argued that exclusive contracts have anticompetitive, or at best neutral effects, if no efficiencies are generated. In contrast, this paper shows that exclusive contracts can have procompetitive effects, provided buyers are imperfect downstream competitors and contract...

Recent literature has shown that an incumbent can use exclusive contracts to maintain supra-competitive prices when buyers of the good are also competitors. Most of the models require the incumbent to completely prevent a more efficient potential entrant from entering, and assume that the...

I study the choice between selling new software commercially and bundling it with ads and distributing it for free as adware. Adware allows advertisers to send targeted information to consumers which improves their purchasing decisions, but also entails a loss of privacy. I show that adware is...

This paper examines the optimal mechanism design problem when buyers have uncertain valuations. This uncertainty can only be resolved after the actual transactions take place and upon incurring significant post-purchase cost. We focus on two different settings regarding how the seller values a...

We examine an incumbent's trade-off between the improved efficiency that business expansion facilitates and the signaling role that business expansion plays in conveying information to potential entrants about the state of demand. We demonstrate that both separating and pooling equilibria...

Search engines face an interesting tradeoff in choosing the way to display their results. While providing high quality unpaid, or “left side” results attracts users, doing so can also cannibalize the revenue that comes from paid ads on the “right side”. This paper examines this tradeoff,...

This paper analyzes a simple vertical product differentiation model with demand uncertainty and derives a risk neutral monopolist's optimal market entry timing, her optimal pricing and optimal quality choice by incorporating Knightian uncertainty, irreversibility, and flexibility in...