The present paper analyses the effects on social welfare of a partial crossparticipation at ownership level in a differentiated Cournot duopoly. We show that cross-participation, despite the fact it appears as an anti-competitive practice which reduces the degree of market competition, may...

Double marginalization causes inefficiencies in vertical markets. This paper argues that such inefficiencies may be beneficial to final consumers in markets producing vertically differentiated goods. The rationale behind this result is that enhancing efficiency in high-quality supply chains...

Contractual inefficiencies within supply chains increase an input price above its marginal cost, therefore they are considered detrimental to consumer surplus. We argue that such inefficiencies may be beneficial to consumers in quality-differentiated markets. Indeed, enhancing contractual...

In this paper we consider the impact of vertical integration on a retailer's choices of product variety and specific, brand-supporting investment. In an incomplete contract environment, vertical merger encourages investment in integrated supply, and foreclosure of non-integrated manufacturers....

When a vertically integrated firm competes against non integrated rivals in the input and the final-good markets, the layman's belief is that, when the non-integrated downstream firms purchase part of their input from the up- stream division of the integrated firm, the downstream division will...

A well-known result in oligopoly theory regarding one-tier industries is that the equilibrium mark-up and the Lerner index decreases with the number of firms. In other words, market power is diminished when more firms are present in the market. In the present paper, we consider a two-tier...

It’s been a long-standing assumption that Irish manufacturing firms are price takers in their output markets. This assumption has been validated by several aggregate level studies. While a much smaller number of studies have examined this issue at a more disaggregated level, they tend to...

When Apple entered the ebook market, prices rose. A recent court decision found Apple guilty of colluding with publishers, blaming the price hike, in part, on agency agreements and prohibiting their use. Building a model to compare these with traditional wholesale agreements, we identify a...

This paper investigates the vertical relations in the Italian retail gasoline industry to study their effects on the retail price. The retailer, in presence of a quantity-decreasing unit discount scheme on the gasoline purchased, has to decide whether to follow the retail price recommended by...

In this paper, I completely characterize the optimal policy against price-fixings when the agency in charge of competition policy lacks information about the production cost of an industry. I consider two types of punishment. The first one consists in imposing a fine proportional to the total...