Producers in a perfectly competitive industry compete to obtain shelf space at the retail level. Barring contract observability problems, slotting allowances are observed in equilibrium. Producers charge a high wholesale price, but they give back their profits via up-front payments to retailers....

We examine the output and profit effects of horizontal mergers between differentiated upstream firms in an intermediate-goods market served by a downstream monopolist. If the merged firm can bundle, transfer pricing is efficient before and after the merger. Absent cost efficiencies, consumer and...

We show that below-cost pricing can arise in intermediate goods markets when a monopolist retailer negotiates sequentially with two suppliers of substitute products. Below-cost pricing by one supplier allows the retailer to extract rents from the second supplier. Thus, the retailer and one...

This article investigates how the use of contracts that condition discounts on the share a supplier receives of a retailer's total purchases (market-share contracts) may affect market outcomes. The case of a dominant supplier that distributes its product through retailers that also sell...

We consider a monopolistic supplier's optimal choice of two-part tariff contracts when downstream firms are asymmetric. We find that the optimal discriminatory contracts amplify differences in downstream firms' competitiveness. Firms that are larger-either because they are more efficient or...

It is widely believed that a supplier who distributes her product through retailers can achieve the vertically integrated outcome with nonlinear contracts, provided the retail price is the only target of control and there is no uncertainty. We show that this result fails when retailers cannot...

type="main" <p>We consider a class of contracts in which buyers commit to giving a seller some minimum share of their total purchases. We show that such contracts can be used by an incumbent seller to reduce the probability of entry by a rival seller when the incumbent can commit to its selling...</p>