A new empirical industrial organisation approach is used to measure seller market power in the French Comté cheese market, characterised by government-approved supply control. The estimation is performed on quarterly data at the wholesale stage over the period 1985-2005. Three different...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the welfare losses associated with asymmetric information about product quality in a competitive market. When consumers cannot observe product characteristics at the time of purchase, atomistic producers have no incentive to supply costly quality. We...