This paper studies competition between Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) and Conventional Insurers. Most of the time, MCOs sign exclusive contracts with providers and these vertical restrictions associated to differentiation in the providers’ market imply a risk segmentation. Taking into...

Economic theory provides various explanations for vertical integration but transaction costs seem to be a major determinant of backward, forward and lateral integration. The paper studies integration trends in the newly emerging Bulgarian pharmaceutical sector, seeking transaction cost...

Recently, the European Commission has decided to implement a simplified procedure in the context of vertical integration. If the combined market shares of the merging firms are less than 25 percent, upstream and downstream, the Commission will consider the merger harmless. The purpose of this...

We analyze exclusive contracts between health care providers and insurers in a model where some consumers choose to stay uninsured. In case of a monopoly insurer, exclusion of a provider changes the distribution of consumers who choose not to insure. Although the foreclosed care provider remains...

We analyze exclusive contracts between health care providers and insurers in a model where some consumers choose to stay uninsured. In case of a monopoly insurer, exclusion of a provider changes the distribution of consumers who choose not to insure. Although the foreclosed care provider remains...

Competition between insurance companies for employees of a firm often increases the prices and reduces the availability of high-quality health plans offered to employees. An insurance company can reduce competition by signing an exclusive contract, which guarantees that the company is the only...

This paper argues that the balance of power between producers and retailers depends on the relative degrees of differentiation at the two levels of the vertical structure. The authors propose an extension of Hotelling's model in which two producers, competing in prices with horizontally...

This paper analyses the impact of competition among downstream firms on an upstream firm's payoff and on its incentive to vertically integrate when firms on both segments negotiate optimal contracts. We argue that tougher competition decreases the downstream industry profit, but improves the...

We investigate the robustness of the new foreclosure doctrine and its associated welfare implications to the introduction of incomplete information. In particular, we let the upstream firm’s marginal cost be private information, unknown to the downstream firms. The previous literature has...

Vertical restraints have been subject of lively policy and academic discussions. Scholars associated with the Chicago School challenged early foreclosure doctrines by arguing that vertical restraints primarily reflected efficiency considerations. More recently, industrial organization economists...