We study the optimal contract choice of an upstream monopolist producing an essential input that may sell to two vertically differentiated downstream firms. The upstream supplier can offer an exclusive contract to one of the firms or non-exclusive contracts to both firms. Each of the latter can...

We study subgame-perfect equilibria of the classical quality-price, multistage game of vertical product differentiation. Each firm can choose the levels of an arbitrary number of qualities. Consumers' valuations are drawn from independent and general distributions. The unit cost of production is...

In a two-tier industry with bottleneck upstream and two downstream firms producing vertically differentiated goods, we identify conditions under which the upstream supplier chooses exclusive or non-exclusive negotiations, or an English auction to sell its essential input. Auctioning off a...

We characterize the equilibrium in a homogeneous good Cournot duopoly in which firms have the choice to react to a cost-push shock by paying a lump-sum adjustment cost in order to offset the initial rise in marginal cost. Our results show that the size of the shock and the size of the adjustment...

We study the incentives towards horizontal merger among firms when the amount of capital is the strategic variable. The type of firms we focus on is workers' cooperatives, but our conclusions apply also to employment-constrained profit maximisers. Within a simple oligopoly model, we prove that...

In this paper, two pairs of complementors have to decide whether to merge and eventually bundle their products. Depending on the degree of competitive pressure in the market, either both pairs decide to merge (with or without bundling), or only one pair merges and bundles, while rivals remain...

We investigate an extended game with observable delay under duopolistic competition in affine supply functions. Firms use the intercepts of supply functions as their strategic variables. Best replies are downward (upward) sloping if the common slope of supply functions is sufficiently low...

The paper proves the existence of a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium in a vertically differentiated duopoly with uncovered market, for a large set of symmetric and asymmetric distributions of consumers, including, among others, all logconcave distributions. The proof relies on the 'income share...

The aim of this paper is to study both the private and the social desirability of a mixed bundling strategy that generates a cost savings effect. We confirm that mixed bundling is the dominant strategy for multiproduct firms, although it may give rise to a prisoner's dilemma. Moreover, we show...

In a Cournot duopoly, if only one firm hires a manager while the other remains entrepreneurial, the Cournot-Stackelberg equilibrium emerges, with the managerial firm as the leader. This happens under at least three different delegation schemes. We illustrate the different meachanisms driving...