This paper provides an analysis of factors facilitating or hindering collusion using data on the occurrence of price-fixing across UK manufacturing industries in the 1950s. The econometric results suggest that collusion is more likely the higher the degree of capital intensity and less likely in...

This paper examines the impact of price competition on advertising/R&D expenditure and market structure. General theoretical results are derived which restrict the space of possible outcomes regarding the behaviour of concentration and advertising/R&D expenditure following an intensification of...

With exogenous participation, strong bidders should be discriminated against weak bidders to maximize revenues (Myerson 1981). When participation is endogenous and the set of potential entrants is large, optimal discrimination if any takes a very different form. Without incumbents, there should...

We experimentally examine the effects of price competition in markets for expe-rience goods where sellers can build up reputations for quality. We compare price competition to monopolistic markets and markets where prices are exogenously fixed (somewhere between the endogenous oligopoly and...

We experimentally examine the effects of flexible and fixed prices in markets for experience goods in which demand is driven by trust. With flexible prices, we observe low prices and high quality in competitive (oligopolistic) markets, and high prices coupled with low quality in non-competitive...

This paper studies the impact of trade policy on industry concentration. Based on the Swiss Business Census, concentration levels for all four-digit manufacturing industries in Switzerland are calculated. Then the effect of a bilateral reduction in technical barriers to trade with the European...

This study analyses the medium-term effect of RD expenditure on firm employment growth. Four cross-sectional waves of an innovation survey conducted in the Netherlands have been used to evaluate the effect on firm growth in the five years following the investment. Panel data fixed effect...

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it presents the results of a “history-friendly” simulation model of evolution of the pharmaceutical industry. Second, it aims at contributing to a more general methodological discussion about agent-based models by proposing an econometric...