We survey the extant literature on the effects of both a bank's organizational structure and the physical distance separating it from the lender on lending decisions. Banks do engage in spatial pricing, where the underlying mechanism can be both transportation costs and information asymmetries....

This paper, which has been prepared for the conference on Economic Governance and Competition at Tilburg University, examines private ordering within the payment card industry to define appropriate security practices and to monitor compliance by network participants. This private ordering regime...

More and more companies appear with strange abbreviations behind their business name. Consider Chrysler Group LLC (instead of Inc.) or LVMH Montres & Joaillerie France SAS. Some even speak about the “endangered corporate form” and point to the rise of the uncorporation. This Primer examines...

This paper studies mergers in markets where firms invest in a portfolio of research projects of different profitability and social value. The portfolio nature of the investment problem brings about novel insights on the external effects of firms' investments. The investment of a firm in one...

Digital platforms facilitate interactions between consumers and merchants that allow collection of profiling information which drives innovation and welfare. Private incentives, however, lead to information asymmetries resulting in market failures both on-platform, among merchants, and...

Should mergers among nonprofi t organizations be assessed diff erently than mergers among for-profit firms? A recent debate in law and economics, boosted by apparently one-sided court decisions, has produced the result that promoting competition is socially valuable regardless of the particular...

We analyze optimal pricing and quality of a monopolistic journal and the optimality of open access in a two-sided model. The predominant aspect of the model that determines the quality levels at which open access is optimal is the nature of the relationship between readers and authors in a...

The past decade has seen growing antitrust concerns about the impact of private label goods on consumer welfare and competition in the grocery trade. Market investigations of the sector have been launched in several Member States, and there have also been legislative attempts to curb the power...

We employ a unique data set containing bank-specific information to explore how foreign bank entry determines credit allocation in emerging markets. We investigate the impact of the mode of foreign entry (greenfield or takeover) on banks' portfolio allocation to borrowers with different degrees...

This paper derives the optimal mix of generation technologies in the electricity sector and discusses how this mix will be achieved in a perfectly competitive electricity market. It then studies the detrimental effect of a price cap on short-term profitability and long-run investment incentives...