In a typical bank credit card transaction, the merchant's bank pays an interchange fee, collectively determined by all participating banks, to the cardholder's bank. This paper shows how the interchange fee balances charges between cardholders and merchants under imperfect competition. The...

Using a simple model of patent licensing followed by product-market competition, this paper investigates several competition policy questions related to standard-setting organizations (SSO's). It concludes that competition policy should not favor patent-holders who practice their patents against...

Over the period 1953-83, twelve accounting measures of profitability, which are not on average highly correlated, imply measures of the profitability advantage of large firms that move closely together. All twelve measures decline significantly and substantially over this entire period; there is...

This brief essay introduces a special issue of the Journal of Industrial Economics devoted to the recent burst of empirical work in industrial organization. Trends in empirical research in this field are discussed, emphasizing the ways in which recent work builds upon and departs from earlier...

The predictions of collusion- and efficiency-based static equilibrium explanations of interindustry profitability differences are formally developed and tested, using appropriate econometric techniques, with intraindustry data on seventy U.S. Internal Revenue Service minor manufacturing...