The purpose of our paper is to examine the profitability and social desirability of both domestic and foreign mergers in a location-quantity competition model, where we allow for the possibility of hollowing-out of the target firm. We refer to hollowing-out as the situation where the target firm...

The seminal paper by Salant, Switzer and Reynolds (1983) showed that merger in a standard Cournot framework with linear demand and linear costs is not profitable unless a large majority of the firms are involved in the merger. However, many strategic aspects matter for firm competition such as...

I find that current US's and EU's Antitrust laws -- in particular their "moderate"' leniency programmes that only reduce or at best cancel sanctions for price-fixing firms that self-report -- may make collusion enforceable even in one-shot competitive interactions, like Bertrand oligopolies and...

This paper evaluates the welfare consequences of the failing firm doctrine in the EU and US merger laws. I combine an oligopoly model with an 'endogenous valuations' auction model. Thereby, I take into account that, in an oligopoly, a firm's willingness to pay for the assets depends on the...

We analyze the efficiency defense in merger control. First, we show that the relationship between exogenous efficiency gains and social welfare can be non-monotone. Second, we consider both endogenous mergers and endogenous efficiencies and find that merger proposals are largely aligned with a...

Leniency policies and rewards for whistleblowers are being introduced in ever more fields of law enforcement, though their deterrence effects are often hard to observe, and the likely effect of changes in the specific features of these schemes can only be observed experimentally. This paper...

Retailers may enjoy stable cartel rents in their output market through the formation of a buyer group in their input market. A buyer group allows retailers to credibly commit to increased input prices, which serve to reduce combined final output to the monopoly level; increased input costs are...

The paper studies how does the size of a cartel affect the possibility that its members can sustain a collusive agreement. I obtain that collusion is easier to sustain the larger the cartel is. Then, I explore the implications of this result on the incentives of firms to participate in a cartel....

Allowing firms to cooperate in their R&D is an industrial policy, which has received much attention in recent economics literature. Many of these contributions are based on the seminal analysis of d'Aspremont and Jacquemin (1988). We provide a general version of their model, which encompasses...