Mergers realize heterogeneous competitive effects on profits, production, and prices. To date, it is unclear whether differential merger outcomes are caused mostly by firms' technology or product market attributes. Furthermore, empirical merger studies conventionally assume that, conditional on...

Economists typically locate the origins of the theory of externalities in A.C. Pigou's The Economics of Welfare (1920, 1932), where Pigou suggested that activities which generate uncompensated benefits or costs—e.g., pollution, lighthouses, scientific research—represent instances of market...

This paper applies a Hotelling model of two-sided markets in analyzing an emergent approach to marketing textbooks. In this approach, a platform provides the content of electronic textbooks for free. This free content spurs sales of complementary products such as a print version of the textbook....

The U.S. and EU Merger Guidelines strongly emphasize the relevance of the "ease of entry" argument in merger evaluations. Up to now, very little is known empirically about how mergers affect entry and exit, and the resulting number of firms in the markets. We empirically test this aspect of...

This paper studies how horizontal mergers between cable providers impact the vertical contracting outcomes (per-subscriber fees that TV cable providers pay the upstream content creators) and consequently the prices and composition of bundles that cable providers offer to end consumers. The...

Changes in the extent of multi-market contact (MMC) between firms often affect market outcomes – quantities and prices. We show that a strategic but purely competitive effect of changes in MMC can change the quantity provided in a market by a firm by as much as 50%, and the prices a firm sets...

This paper considers a general symmetric quantity-setting oligopoly where the "coefficient of cooperation" defined by Cyert and DeGroot (An Analysis of Cooperation and Learning in a Duopoly Context, 1973) is interpreted as the parameter indicating severity of competition. It is obtained that...