This thesis strives to offer new insights in two main areas. First, in the well-researched domain of payment cards chapters 2 and 3 investigate an aspect that has hitherto been scantly examined, namely, the fact that merchant usage fees differ substantially among merchant sectors. Additionally,...

The thesis at hand includes three distinct essays that analyze economic issues related to liberalized electricity markets. In the first essay, the effects of capacity mechanisms on the market structure in electricity markets are investigated. We consider a model with dominant firms and a...

The PhD studies different empirical methods to detect bid-rigging cartels. It shows first that simple statistical screens perform very well to detect bid-rigging infringement. Second, the econometric method of Bajari, well established in the literature, produces poor results.